Federal Reserve Research Report: Third-Party Supply Chains Become New Fault Lines for Financial Stability, Systemic Risk Enters Quantifiable Stage

According to the latest research released by the Federal Reserve, there is a high concentration risk at the "third-party service provider" level between the top 100 banks in the United States and 100 non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs). If key cloud, payment, or core IT service providers experience a failure, it will quickly evolve into a systemic event across markets. The model shows that in extreme scenarios, the tail losses caused by systemic incidents can far exceed normal operational risks, with operational disruptions becoming a major source of losses rather than traditional credit events.

From a macro-financial perspective, this study quantitatively confirms for the first time that "digital infrastructure failure" itself can serve as a trigger for financial crises, rather than merely being an ancillary risk. When key third-party nodes fail, it will simultaneously impact payment clearing, liquidity allocation, credit transmission, and risk hedging mechanisms, temporarily increasing demand for dollars, compressing global dollar liquidity, and causing credit spreads and volatility to spike. Although banks have lower nominal exposures than non-bank institutions, their extreme losses relative to revenue are even greater, indicating that the vulnerability of the large traditional financial system to tail risks has been long underestimated by the market.

The cryptocurrency market is more sensitive to such "functional risks." Exchanges, wallets, custody, oracle services, and settlement layers are highly dependent on cloud and third-party authorized services. Once there is a regional or vendor-level disruption, it can easily lead to a chain reaction of clearing and liquidity vacuum. Historical experience shows that such non-price shocks often lead to passive deleveraging of short-term leveraged funds, with volatility sharply amplified. The short-term Bitcoin structure support will test high-leverage dense areas, and if the liquidity below is penetrated, one must be wary of the risk of a "liquidity spiral decline."

Bitunix analysts: The core significance of this report is that the market is transitioning from "financial risk pricing" to a new stage of "infrastructure risk pricing." Future capital allocation will not only consider interest rates and growth but will also simultaneously assess the stability of system operations and the concentration of supply chains. Risk appetite will become more event-driven, and true structural opportunities will arise when resilient assets and decentralized infrastructure values are repriced.