How clear is it that stablecoins have value other than by enabling speculative transactions on blockchains? My main model of stablecoins, borrowing from Matt Levine, is that if you do a lot of stuff on-chain, it is also useful to have an on-chain way to transact in fiat.
I could definitely think of many situations in which stablecoins would be useful, but on priors I would guess they’re fairly small compared to uses facilitating speculation.
How clear is it that stablecoins have value other than by enabling speculative transactions on blockchains?
I don’t have a good sense of this tbh, I mostly got this from pretty anecdotal evidence rather than looking at data (and realistically I won’t do a deep dive on this data unless some analysis was handed to me on a platter).[1]
My current guess is that there is significant uses for stablecoins in practice right now. My guess is that their theoretical value is probably lower than if you were to use the same resources to build more centralized systems like MPesa or Wave, but of course there’s less VC interest and also less of an easy path to profitability than from being subsidized by crypto speculation/​fraud.
How clear is it that stablecoins have value other than by enabling speculative transactions on blockchains? My main model of stablecoins, borrowing from Matt Levine, is that if you do a lot of stuff on-chain, it is also useful to have an on-chain way to transact in fiat.
I could definitely think of many situations in which stablecoins would be useful, but on priors I would guess they’re fairly small compared to uses facilitating speculation.
I don’t have a good sense of this tbh, I mostly got this from pretty anecdotal evidence rather than looking at data (and realistically I won’t do a deep dive on this data unless some analysis was handed to me on a platter).[1]
My current guess is that there is significant uses for stablecoins in practice right now. My guess is that their theoretical value is probably lower than if you were to use the same resources to build more centralized systems like MPesa or Wave, but of course there’s less VC interest and also less of an easy path to profitability than from being subsidized by crypto speculation/​fraud.
If I search around there’s certainly evidence of significant crypto uses in some places, but I’m not sure about the reliability of this evidence.