Stablecoins are pretty cool in theory. They promise near-to-instant transfers of any value across any border, at transaction costs that could be far below what’s currently charged. Smart contracts might take the counterparty risk out of escrow and look useful for stuff like subscriptions, insurance and sports betting. And since everything happens in realtime on a public blockchain, there’s full transparency.
In practice, in the more than 10 years since their invention, stablecoins have carved out a few real-world niches but have not been widely adopted for anything other than crypto trading.
That hasn’t stopped people throwing around some very big numbers, however. For a blast of optimism, try the three brokers that led Circle’s recent IPO.