I don’t see this talked about all that much but stablecoins’ growing usage likely to be another major nail in the coffin for (non-stable) crypto as payment rail theses. /1

2/ if someone is earning, say, USD and wants to remit that to family in India or Mexico, they need fast, cheap, and maybe private transactions. They definitely don’t need or want to also take brief speculative exposure to a separate volatile intermediate currency.

3/ similarly, if I want to pay you back for a coffee you got me with euros, I have no desire to involve a separate volatile currency in that repayment.

4/ when bitcoin launched, it was everything in one package - people used it for privacy, for censorship resistance, (as well as seizure resistance), because there was no way to get the first two things without exposure to bitcoin price fluctuations.

5/ but if I can get censorship resistance and privacy without price volatility, I (and basically everyone) would always avoid the volatility except for when we explicitly want to bet on that: to bet on appreciation of a cryptocurrency in fiat terms.

6/ some day, bitcoin may be a unit of account. Expenses may be denominated in it. But that’s a long way off. For payments, it will only be an intermediary step for the foreseeable future, with both sender and receiver necessarily converting to/from fiat since costs are in fiat.

7/ so what’s Bitcoin’s sustainable value proposition? 1. Depreciation resistance - it’s specifically not fiat. And maybe 2. Seizure resistance. not clear if this can be had from a stablecoin where you either have seizable collateral or for uncollateralized - risk of collapse.