There's a lot of hype around stablecoins right now. After Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge last year, everyone from startups to big banks are seeking to get in on the action. A crypto VC recently told me they've heard 15 pitches for stablecoin startups in the past few weeks. But beneath the hype is a powerful truth: Stablecoins are a transformative technology that are already remaking the global payments landscape and, in time, will play a pivotal geopolitical role by reinforcing the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent currency.
Skeptics will be tempted to decry this as just another crypto fad—and with good reason. Having been in the industry since 2013, I’ve seen narratives rise and fall. First, it was “Bitcoin for the unbanked,” a proposition that came to be hollow after the FDIC made clear the top reason Americans remain unbanked is not due to technical barriers—it's because they lack the money to meet minimum balance requirements. Then came the NFT bubble which saw speculators pay over $1 million for “Bored Apes”, helping sites like OpenSea notch more than $60 million in monthly revenue—before that number collapsed to less than $200,000. Who would have thought spending millions of dollars on digital monkeys to display at your Art Basel house party wasn't sustainable?
