Case Details
From Crypto Fear to Digital Financial Literacy: Stablecoin and Digital Assets Public Education Challenge
A stablecoin is digital money backed one-for-one by real currency reserves, licensed by a central bank, and redeemable on demand. It is not Bitcoin. It is not a gamble. It is the next generation of regulated payments, and almost nobody knows that.
This case is set around the gap between what a regulated stablecoin is and what the public believes it to be. At the moment a landmark regulatory framework goes live, students face a population that is variously unaware, confused, cautious, or simply uninterested in a financial instrument whose public debut has been overshadowed by high-profile fraud and collapse elsewhere in the industry. The law has moved. Public understanding has not.
Students become the decision-makers, working across marketing strategy, institutional governance, consumer behavior, and public policy simultaneously, on a problem that is unresolved, commercially consequential, and happening right now.
Although set in Hong Kong, this case travels. The Teaching Note includes a dedicated extension for American and other international jurisdictions, mapping the challenge onto the US GENIUS Act, EU MiCA, and Singapore's MAS framework. The classroom conversation works equally well in Boston, London, or Singapore.
Learning Objective:
- Understand what a regulated stablecoin is, how it differs from cryptocurrencies, tokenised deposits, CBDCs, and payment apps, and why that distinction is the starting point for any communication strategy.
- Design a public education campaign for a new financial product in a low-trust environment, segmenting audiences by awareness level, risk profile, and receptivity rather than demographics alone.
- Identify why no single institution can lead public education unilaterally in a fragmented regulatory ecosystem, and propose a governance structure that fills the gap without creating new conflicts of interest.
- Apply behavioral economics and adoption theory to distinguish between consumer barriers that information campaigns can address and those that require structural or experiential interventions beyond any campaign's reach.
- Develop a safety communication strategy that honestly specifies what a regulatory framework protects, what it does not, and how to communicate residual risk to different audiences without either alarming or misleading them.