If so, what is the point of stablecoins if the banks themselves are running it? If regulations and technology are no longer an issue, can’t they just make USD transfers fast and easy? Why bother with a wrapper around USD?
I think at a macro level, the key point is that banks were initially unmotivated/uninterested in, and critical of crypto. The long-term effort behind stablecoins to become compliant and aligned with regulatory frameworks has now positioned them as useful infrastructure. Today, banks can simply adopt or acquire the benefits of a system they had no interest in building themselves. The current US administration clearly helps.
Sending USD from random bank from random country to another random bank from another random country is a network problem. While it’s solved by SEPA in EUR to EUR countries by pan european clearing and settlement systems, out in the big world it’s not as simple. Specially considering cross-border.
You have to somehow get the payment message across banks and decide on how to settle. It fundamentally a hard problem.
Stable cryptos put the message and settlement in the same system and it’s a global one (not just EU/wtv). The problem is then, which stable crypto? The moment the Fed has a USD crypto, our ECB has an Eur crypto, than that problem is solved. In the meanwhile, joining a big stable usd crypto might still provide you better remittance routes (and settlement) than sending messages over swift.
Tldr: stablecoins solve remittance routing “edge cases”, if the stablecoin is adopted enough
Similarly, if BoA supported an Ethereum stablecoin but a random bank in Argentina supports a Solana stablecoin, it’s still going to be a pain to transfer money right?
I’m struggling to see how this is a blockchain issue rather than a regulatory + agreement on international standard issue.
If they want, then they can make banks the only entities who can hold their stablecoin, and the whole thing would be invisible to everyone else.
If they allow other people to hold the stablecoin directly, then they could still have the invisible system with banks holding it, plus there'd be extra capabilities on top, like letting people use the coin in smart contracts.
The point is for banks to remain powerful in a world where cryptocurrency is at thing; in other words, to subvert the point of cryptocurrency.
My error was in believing being a scam had any correlation with whether or not something would be successful or not.
I think you missed "profitable" from that list.
There's a huge gulf between a night at the poker tables, and buying into a little of MSFT's dividend, and it's really disengenuous to pretend they're the same.
The people who are the thinkers in this space like to quack like libertarians and look back fondly at the gold standard. For better or for worse, they are driving US policy now. It’s one of the reasons why our government is setting the financial and economic system on fire and destabilizing the dollar.
If you want to provide fan service to the idiots keeping you in office, and get really really rich in this process, what do you do? Pivot to crypto as there isn’t enough gold to capitalize the world, and outsource the new version of the fed to private interests.
This is a way to stay relevant from the banks point of view in what whatever this new world turns into. They add value because there’s inherent trust in day JPMC, UBS or Barclays versus some random crypto bro company.
Once AI takes over and these digital currencies are “smart” and tightly integrated, we’re going to be living in a Black Mirror episode.
its cause regulation???, easy and fast to moving money its good until you got hack from state sponsored actor that you can't even do anything (ehm ehm north korea ehm)
in seriousness, people can get away with billions of dollar and "vanish" is wild world if you think about it.
USA is just bad at governing. Tries not to tell corporations what to do, so it ends up with toothless half-assed laws that do nothing except being a tool for regulatory capture.