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Stablecoin is not a technology. It's an excuse. An excuse to do what banks do while not being regulated like a bank or using the infrastructure banks use. Similar to how Airbnb is not a technology but an excuse to do what hotels do without hotel's license.
So it makes no sense to compare it to database, a technology.
Will this excuse work? Banking is a heavily regulated field so it's less likely than Airbnb, but it's ultimately up to lawmakers.
JPMorgan Chase, BofA, and their ilk have R&D budgets large enough to have already launched a dozen stablecoins by now. They haven't, not because they can't (on a technical level) but because they don't actually see the value to it (on a business level). They're simply paying lip service to crypto because it pumps up share value, the same way every business was bragging about their AI investments just a few months ago.
That always works out great.
Can't wait for the next explosion, followed by government bailout, followed by some portion of all our wealth vaporizing, all to the benefit of a small number of people.
You could replicate USDC with a website where you log in with a password and move money between numbered accounts and they don’t run any AML/KYC checks on you. If you did that it would be super illegal. In fact someone did exactly this, it was called Liberty Reserve and everyone went to prison.
But because it’s got the magic of the blockchain laws don’t apply.
The regulation that came after has in my personal experience privatized airbnb and now it's hard to find a private renter, when I started using it that was the standard.
Nobody cares about small tech companies breaking the law for a few users.
Everyone cares about {insert bad outcome from mass regulatory avoidance}.
(Also, of the 3 airbnb founders, one has delusions of being the next Steve Jobs and turning it into an everything app (Chesky), another now works for DOGE (Gebbia), and the last is sucking up to Chinese government data requests (Blecharczyk)... so, yeah, not exactly the sort of folks that should be trusted with light regulation)
More examples include Uber to bypass taxi regulation, and generative AI to bypass copyright regulation (as well as consumer protection regulation in both cases as well as labor protections).
Similarly, in unregulated free market capitalism, there would be no copyright to bypass.
I am not trying to argue that either of these area panaceas but I feel like we are often in denial about how much collectivism is involved in the things we don't like about capitalism.
It's awful how behind the times the US is when it comes to banking. 2 - 3 days to get money from one account to another is beyond embarrassing in the modern day. It took the US something like 15 years to get chip-and-pin.
Banks are still these monolithic entities that don't care to innovate or listen to customers because "what are you going to do, go to one of the other 4 monoliths that are all in cahoots with each other"
SEPA was a success but it was only a first step to modernise the banking system. The following regulations/directives like PSD2 failed in my opinion.
The ECB also had one of those CBDC built much earlier than people have been told. They already had something quite advanced around 2020, with a optimist launch date in 2022 I believe.
It obviously failed miserably and I read a few weeks ago that they are "exploring Ethereum and Solana for digital euro launch".
I would be curious what happened exactly but my guess is the banks just said "NO WAY".
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a system that allows me to do what I want with my funds without anyone else controlling it.
Uber just captured wealth via operating at a loss until competition was absorbed or destroyed.
AirBnB just helped further drive up the prices of single family homes and didn’t really have much effect on the hospitality industry at all - it caused a minor observable loss in profit which ultimately resulted in nothing.
I don't think AirB&B really improved hotels, but it did organize and centralize the "vacation rental" market, making it easier to, for example, rent a beach cottage for the weekend.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/blog/why-do-banks-share-your-financial-i...
[2] https://www.thegamer.com/paypal-not-accepting-most-currencie...
They used "mostly instantaneous payments" as the carrot to get those individuals to use the service.
Banks have near zero obligations around Zelle transaction fraud - if they do anything, it's often mostly as a goodwill gesture for a customer.
I've had next day ACH between all my various accounts for years now. Wires have also been a thing basically forever though most people need to pay to send and receive them. Same day ACH and FedNow are both out there too, though I've yet to see widespread implementation.
One reason the U.S government has to like stablecoins is because Tether is one of the biggest buyers of U.S treasuries that they use to back their stablecoins.
In a manner of speaking. You need to trust that the issuers have the reserve they claim. There's no way around this, unless the asset in reserve is equally ethereal (i.e. another cryptocurrency).
Tether, for one, almost certainly doesn't have the reserves.
They are now really backed. It might be they weren’t. Now they definitely are.
https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=usdt
All these years all this Fud and so far nobody demonstrated what you clam.
They are also the faster to block their stablecoin whenever there is a hack.
It's worth noting that no full-reserve bank has ever gotten a US banking license, even though many have tried.
That depend on how you view money. Lending does increase the volume of money in circulation, in that sense it creates money. But that view is too simple to be useful.
The regulators that regulate, and in particular control reserve ratios (complex calculations that banks have to make about the relationships between their various assets) and base interest rates are the real creators of money.
The side stepping of those regulators is interesting. The conventional view is that it will lead to the same sort of financial instability as existed before the gold standard was abolished and we (pretty much the entire western world) moved to modern banking and fiat currency.
A hundred years of quite stable money was quite an achievement.
Stablecoins are much more heavily regulated than banks, being required to have 100% reserves under the GENIUS act, unlike banks who generally only ever hold on to 10% of the money you deposit with them.
Using their infrastructure? Why?
banks are an excuse to have closed source ledgers that don't operate efficiently for internet capital markets
if they wanted to, they could open source their ledgers and let anyone make them faster, more interoperable, more programmable, etc.
stablecoins operate on infra that is more like linux for finance, anyone can contribute to blockchain rails and even run their own nodes
Stablecoins hold a sizable portion of the treasury market - https://fintelegram.com/stablecoins-became-a-top-20-us-debt-...
