The Weekly Stable (Vol. 1)

Hi stable subscribers,

Welcome to the first edition of our newest newsletter, The Weekly Stable 🎉

(In keeping with our creative newsletter-naming convention.)

If you've been reading This Week in Fintech for a while, you know that I have been a broken record for years and years about one particular payments innovation: stablecoins.

Interest in stables has never been higher.

Reliable, deeply liquid, fiat-pegged digital currencies are one of the most promising payment innovations with immediate, real-world applications in crypto and fintech. But you don't have to take our word for it: financial institutions, policymakers, and fintechs are all starting to explore stablecoins as financial infrastructure. I have been an investor into this ecosystem for a while via The Fintech Fund, which has backed companies like Brale, Zero Hash, CoinFlow, Rise, Conduit, Mesh Connect, TransFi, Goldfinch, Eco, LB Finanzas, and Paysail.

And the universe of stablecoin companies – issuers, orchestrators, applications, users – is growing every day.

You can see it in maps like the Ultimate Stablecoin Directory from Nilos: a database of 80+ real-world stablecoin use cases across industries - from emerging markets to enterprise solutions.

But there are many, many still-unanswered implementation questions. Can you build the same kind of transaction protections as traditional rails, while remaining competitive on costs? How do you solve FX liquidity? What will the regulatory treatment be in the US?

In this newsletter, we'll keep track of all new developments in this quickly-evolving space, as we get ready for Stablecon, the largest global stablecoin conference with 1,500+ attendees and 100+ speakers, taking place on May 29th in New York with our Founding Partners Zero Hash, Mesh, and BVNK.

And now, enjoy another week of stablecoin news below.

(And find us online at @thestablecon and linkedin/stablecon)

💡

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Nubank, the largest global neobank and largest bank in Brazil, is expanding the feature that rewards holders of the digital dollar USDC with a 4% rate to all accountholders globally.

USDC issuer Circle announced its acquisition of Hashnote – the issuer of USYC, which is the largest tokenized treasury and money market fund in the world, with $1.5 billion+ deployed. As Simon Taylor noted, "A major downside of popular Stablecoins like [USDC] or [USDT] was that they don’t offer yield. Stablecoins are like “checking,” and Tokenized Money Market Funds become like “savings.”

There has been a lot of debate about stablecoin costs: are they truly cheaper to use than conventional payment rails for all use-cases (domestic p2p, x-border, B2B, etc.)? When it comes to the narrower question of comparing stablecoin payments against each other, Brale* did the homework: Costs to send $1,000 on leading blockchains. tl;dr - "Almost all supported chains offer sub $0.01 transaction fees up to 100X cheaper than ACH."

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said that the U.S. banking industry will embrace cryptocurrencies for payments if regulators allow it, while BNY CEO Robin Vince told the World Economic Forum at Davos that, "Digital assets represent a new interesting, innovative technology, which we think could be important to the financial system over the next 10, 20 years."

Reporter Yueqi Yang predicted that Telegram will leverage its crypto-native user base this year by launching its own stablecoin (having integrated USDT last year); relatedly, this week Telegram announced that TON will become the exclusive blockchain infrastructure powering Telegram’s mini app ecosystem.

And Dfns published this stablecoin liquidity map:

ZeroHash is looking for a Manager-Director of Zero Hash Payments Europe BV. The ideal candidate is an experienced finance executive to help ensure the company complies with the evolving crypto regulatory framework in EMEA, as well as assist with business development in the region.