Crypto Firms, Fintechs and Banks Hope to Dominate Stablecoins. Who Will Win? - Ep. 888
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
Transcript preview
Preview only
Everybody wants to pick winners and losers. Like, is it gonna be the apple, or is it gonna be the potato? Right? Like, which one of these are we doing? And I'm saying the future actually looks like this pacho. Right? Like, it's just gonna everything's gonna be in there, and it's all together. I worry right now that, to be totally honest, and I've said this elsewhere, we're seeing a whole lot of Myspace and very little Facebook, and the answer to who will win is none of the people currently on the field.
Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. The stablecoin race is heating up in a big way, with both big and small players getting in. I had a conversation with Austin Campbell about how it might shake out and was surprised by what he said. Once stablecoins become integrated, he believes the system could end up all being a lot less decentralized and censorship resistant than the ideals that crypto has long espoused. Austin seems to think that tech innovation will matter less and financial regulation would matter more and could even prevent dis
Hey, Laura. Thank you for having me back.
This week, we saw multiple announcements that show that the stablecoin race is heating up in a big way. First, on Monday, Fortune reported that Stripe, in conjunction with crypto VC firm Paradigm, is developing a layer one blockchain called Tempo for stablecoin payments. Then on Tuesday, Circle announced it'll be launching its own stablecoin focused blockchain, Arc. And this is on top of several other stablecoin chains that are in the works, like Plasma, Stable, Codex. So before we just, like, go into the details on all of these different chains, just explain why it is that you think we're see
Yeah. So I think, you know, to give what I will describe as call of the median corporate response to many of these things, it's that people themselves are using stablecoins for things. If you look at things like Stripe, if you look at Circle, this is obviously the reason these businesses are in existence and interested is paying for things with dollars through the form of like electronic money. So it's not surprising they're looking at these implementations and trying to build ones where they capture the value. If you wanna be financially nihilistic about it, the answer as to why they're doing
And so, what is it about a chain that's focused specifically on stablecoin payments that is necessary, or or maybe it's not, but that, you know, these players seem to think it's necessary that isn't offered by existing public blockchains.
Okay. So I would say maybe the best example of this I I was back at JPMorgan in the day when we were thinking about what later became Onyx. And one of the things you think about with financial applications is what are the transaction preferences of the underlying people and what are they using it for? So, like, a good example of the critique of the architecture of Ethereum that I think is meaningful is if we were to try to put all payments on Ethereum and it's lunchtime, and I'm standing in line at a deli and I'm trying to buy a sandwich, and I've got a tap to pay. And when I do that, I pay so
Okay. Well, so then I'd be so interested to hear because we're entering this space where clearly there's gonna be a ton of competition. And so I'd love to just go through one by one and hear what you think are kind of the advantages and disadvantages of these different chains. So let's start with the Tempo one, which is the one that Stripe is doing apparently with Paradigm. And it's actually going to be led by
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.