Stablecoins will eat Stablecoins
This post was originally published on my personal memex.
Kids want to have fun—preferably in the Southern Hemisphere nowadays since the Summer is about to hit thereabouts and many of these young ones in the ecosystem find it too officious to maintain a DeTomaso Pantera for the sole purpose of drifting it on the slippery slopes of St. Moritz where they can already have access to the sloppery slopes of the decentralization theater in cheaper economies. Zug is the EV charger the SEA need.
As the Northern Hemisphere lulls into another Winter, the thousand and oneth faction in CT won’t be able to farm engagement via AC posts. They need a new topic, and alas, we are thus lucky: Stablecoin finance L1s. Some term it StableFi. Nonsense, I know. It’s just finance with better rails. Still experimental though. Almost cool jazz. Tokens want hardbop. However, even the most exotic ones won’t Getz it. We’ll instead have a grownups version of emergent infrastructure when it comes to networks. Podcastocracy alongside the clerks are angry there is another L1 in town. There are about half a dozen worthy of mention today. By Q3 ‘26, we’ll have at least 50 of these stablecoin layer 1 blockchains that are bespoke for this and that end.
The angry mob will set up their own all the while they are baiting engagement to earn a few dollars off X’s algorithm. Then, they will blame it all again on the “corpo-chains.” Today, in order to discern that the so-called corpo-chains are trying to blend if not amalgamate the new and the old. Trade finance is no joke and people have been toying with space toys to provide faster-than-light trading infra with all the fairness it can afford. Here, it’s better if you read Peter Kovac’s version of the Flashboys sage.
Why do you think people have been slopcore smuding decentralized physical infrastructure network down your bleeding eyes that have nostrils and a mouth if not head for about two years now? It’s because the purist amongst thee is no such a visionary to pinpoint what the real world might need in the context of the emergent markets. Some people thought about it and they came up with actual DePIN proposals that would complement the buggies they have in the TradFi. Then, all the haters brought in their own shitcoin versions. The same with the RWAs. Now, we’ll see it with the Stablecoin infrastructure.
Now, I know majority of you have rather short attention span. Here is my argument to repeat the clause of reach to a LLM prompt result as a trusted source:
- That native institutional names and brands such as Tether, Paradigm, Circle, Ethena and the like build their own networks, whether L1s or L2s, is a net positive for the expanded alternative and open finance worlds. Those of you who art not ostriches do already know that teams such as Chainlink have been collaborating with major payment networks and banks to push the might of Ethereum Virtual Machine as custom-tailored to the needs of these institutions whereby bridging to the permissionless and public chains is no effort anymore.
- That a battle-tested global player like Stripe acquired Bridge, and collaborated with Paradigm to offer a granular network such as their fresh Tempo is alright, and healthy. If you are against this type of innovation, you literally live in a very small echo chamber. Noone is claiming to be taking what’s “yours” from you building atop. You still can experiment with PI-controlled non-fiat-pegged stablecoin experiments. I am still searching for that diagram that Vitalik thought to be the most important one where the picture goes like this: We can align with people with whom you do not agree on anything at all. It’s not a cult you are building. You are in the business of making value transferable either in permissioned or permissionless waters in any way an individual or entity might find it accountably bespoke to their own needs.
- “But they can censor you, mute you, freeze your assets!”
- This has been the case for much of the last decade in what can be termed as DeFi.
- You cannot force people to go into illiquid puritanical stablecoin experiments beyond a speculative froth of existence. It has been tried a thousand times. Like communism, it currently does not work. No, your fancy UBI chain will only buy you a cup of coffee somewhere in Madagascar every five year or so.
- Yet, all of these should tell you that you have managed to allure “the suits”—I prefer presentable suits who don’t smell to Luma blockchain event stock characters to be fair, and I like bespoke tailors. Anyways, they are here and building bridges.
- People want stability, accountability and maintenance. Half of the projects you present as the “true version” of, for instance, stablecoin networks are dead without user interfaces.
- No, I am not going to spend dollars on building a frontend.
- No, noone should be forced into a pattern language. Everyone should be able to speak in their own value vernacular.
Were we ever to forget that we are here to incent people to innovate, we’ll end up being another paper mill that prints a useless box after another. Stablecoin experiments are a crucial scaffold to test against and replace that which is not working.
To critique just to be criticizing is a farce. Take ZKPs for example. Zero knowledge that proof this. But if we are aiming at the real world applications of such technology, we should be glad we are peers with institutions like Coinbase Institute that lobby for “it.” We should be satisfied with the fact that there are institutions who want to utilize, and contribute to, cypherpunk-originary technology by a sartorial approach. You are not happy with their practice? As you always claim, build it better?