Excerpt- I was recently given a prompt by a stablecoin payment infrastructure startup to come up with a set of narratives/memes that can inspire their gtm strategy and a market research that naturally accompanied this exercise. The following is a summary of what are stablecoins and snippets from the client report with assistance from Claude to highlight key points. The company’s name is removed for confidentiality.
Nov 4 2024
Building infrastructure on crypto rails or a blockchain-based app reveals the significant challenge of integrating this tech infrastructure into existing software or user flows. So far, blockchain and crypto have proven their utility and adoption primarily in DeFi and TradFi applications. However, stablecoin based payments could introduce a new type of payment infrastructure with apps to support it. This emerging system aligns with Open Finance principles, potentially disrupting traditional methods of payments, transfers, and banking for everyday merchants, businesses, and consumers.
Think of stablecoins as digital versions of traditional money, like a digital dollar. While cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can be quite volatile – their value going up and down dramatically – stablecoins are designed to stay steady, usually matching the value of a regular dollar. - Thanks Claude.
Stablecoin infrastructure has shown to enable (1) faster and lower cost transactions bypassing traditional banking delays and high fee payments, (2) borderless and accessible by design providing a bridge to global finance without the need for a traditional bank account, (3) always awake or online by nature being accessible and usable 24/7 unlike traditional banking.
From a personal build standpoint, having developed a commerce platform allowing merchants to sell their goods in USDC (and Credit Card), we saw merchants and buyers bypass the Stripe transaction fee of 3 to 5% when goods were paid for using USDC. Although, purchasing for goods and services with stablecoins is still not as well adopted it validates why reputable payments infra players like Stripe would be bullish on stables as demonstrated recently by acquiring Bridge for $1.1 billion (source).
We also saw Coinbase/Base signal a similar appetite for the acceleration of payments and stables through its acquisition of Utopia Labs in an effort to scale low cost and fast global payments (source). We can safely bet that this acceleration of support for stable payment infrastructure with dev kits to implement applications will see this as a method of adoption in what I believe to be Crypto’s Fintech moment. Prompting networks and organisations like Visa and Paypal to integrate this into their services.
Stablecoins, payments, infrastructure etc are boring topics but I think that's to its advantage. What it touches on is relatable to all, money. It can tap into quite literally any audience, social class or culture. It can also impact culture just like Visa and Apple Pay created this narrative around [‘Invisible Money’](https://www.themoneyedge.com.au/blog/categories/accounting-and-tax/out-of-sightout-of-mind-invisible-money/#:~:text=When was the last time,all examples of Invisible Money.) referring to digital transactions rather than the use of Cash. Or how they influenced terminology and UX with Visa’s ‘Swipe’ and Apple’s ‘Tap’ to pay using its NFC technology.
I asked my community on X to fill in the question mark on the Venn diagram here. I already wanted to have ‘Network’ in the final diagram which represents protocols, chains, infrastructure, network(s) that help money and culture to become productised and utilised. It was interesting to see the response and the interaction on this, responses included Community, Infrastructure, Education, Talent, Tech etc. @steadydrift went further with this evolved diagram accompanied by this explanation ‘…my main thing is culture = values + behavior - and money is a technology that enables behavior (exchange)’.