My friend Valla Vakili (formerly of Visa & Citi Ventures) has written a provocative piece about what stablecoins actually represent, which is "finance's first real digital format change." It's one of the most unique treatments of the subject I've ever read and a must read for people trying to wrap their arms around what this transformation will look like. He's not on Twitter so I'm quoting the most salient paragraphs here: The history of digital format shifts reveals more about stablecoin potential than debates about whether stablecoins are "real money." Focusing on monetary properties is like imagining the future of music by staying locked in arguments over MP3 audio quality. The breakthrough insights come from understanding what kinds of businesses digital formats enable. Format changes create outsider moments. Hollywood couldn't imagine Netflix because they thought in theatrical windows, not on-demand streaming. Record labels couldn't imagine iTunes because they thought in albums, not songs. Finance has never had a true digital format change, so innovation has been constrained by existing infrastructure—limiting the kind of creative repattern by outsiders that transformed music and video. Stablecoins let the outsiders in. This doesn't mean digital money is identical to digital media—money is regulated, and people experience earning, spending, and losing money very differently than consuming content. But digital money will need to go through the same fundamental steps: changing customer behavior and building enduring businesses around new user experiences. Among other reasons, his arguments further bolster my belief that we should be skeptical of stablecoin implementations by financial "insiders" like banks and even FinTechs. To me, JPM is highly unlikely to figure any of this out, and to a lesser extent, neither is Stripe. Circle and the other crypto-natives coming after it are the ones to watch. They are not wedded to the old format, economically or otherwise. The entire piece is worth a read and a further discussion. What's the future of fiat money? Not as a finance thing but as a user experience? Link below