Stablecoins: Crypto’s Trojan Horse to Mass Adoption

Stablecoins: Crypto’s Trojan Horse to Mass Adoption

Back in the early 2010s, I remember trying to get the owner of a Brooklyn bodega to accept bitcoin as payment for groceries.

At the time, bitcoin was trading around a few hundred dollars. But I believed it was the future of money. So I became an evangelist, sharing the bitcoin gospel with the masses.

Here was a new asset that allowed you to store your money outside the traditional financial system. But unlike physical gold, it’s digital… Meaning you could send it to anyone anywhere in the world at any time with just the click of a mouse.

It essentially gave you the freedom to become your own bank. You didn’t need to trust a third party to hold it on your behalf. You retain complete control over your money.

On top of that, this cool new tech had a fixed supply, making it disinflationary. You can’t “print” more bitcoin like you can with dollars and other fiat currencies. That made it an inflation-resistant asset as well as a non-custodial asset.

Even though bitcoin was novel money – the network launched in 2009 – the bodega owner was initially willing to accept it as payment.

But there was a problem… The transaction would take at least 10 minutes to go through. He didn’t want to wait that long. So I ended up paying him in dollars.

Too bad for him. Back then, bitcoin was trading around $129 per token. That grocery bill payment would’ve been worth about $107,000 today.

Looking back, I can’t really blame the bodega owner for his decision. Although bitcoin is the sixth-most valuable asset in the world today by market cap, it’s still rarely used for payments.

And that seems to go against bitcoin’s original ethos…

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, developed it specifically as a form of payment. In his (or their) famous 2008 white paper outlining the concept, Satoshi wrote:

For better or worse, bitcoin is now seeing widespread adoption primarily as a monetary asset… Not as payment technology.

In other words, bitcoin is becoming a rival to reserve assets like gold and the U.S. dollar. It’s not a rival to Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App, PayPal, or Venmo.

But bitcoin’s growing acceptance by Wall Street, corporations, and even national governments is paving the way for crypto payment solutions. (This is all part of a trend we call The Convergence. More on this below.)

There’s just one technological gap they need to cross before we get to mass adoption… And a bridge is coming soon.

A New Crypto Payment Option