Forget CBDC’s, Stablecoins are a Private Sector Innovation.

Here is our pick of the 3 most important Stablecoin news stories during the week.

Over $1.5 trillion in Stablecoins has been transacted in the last 12 months from five different Private Sector issuers: Tether (USDT), Circle (USDC), Binance (BUSD), Maker (DAI) and Huobi (HUSD).  At the same time, we have seen a raft of big players begin to embrace stablecoins for payments.

* Visa joined forces with Circle to make $USDC transactions compatible with credit cards.

* Mastercard said it’s keen to embrace compliant stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.

* PayPal invested in Stablecoin as a Service provider Paxos and Custody provider Curv. Paypal to buy custodian Curv for 500m after 29m Invested.

* BNY Mellon said it believes the future of virtual money lies in stablecoins.

So what about Bitcoin?  This article postulates that it’s real competitors are CBDC’s.

Bitcoin’s Future May Be Dwarfed by Interoperable Central Bank Digital Currencies

 

Meanwhile the most advanced CBDC is in China and is expanding it’s trails both domestically and now in cross border.  Last week, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) announced that it has joined forces with the central banks of United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Thailand to explore the use of digital currencies in cross-border payments. Analysts believe that China’s e-CNY CBDC, once it is accepted for use outside of China’s borders, could one day challenge the supremacy of the U.S. dollar in international trade and finance.

China’s DCEP project launches biggest digital yuan test yet

So in summary, stablecoins are becoming a three cornered battle ground for consumer wallets between Private Sector Issuers, Central Banks of which China is the clear leader and Crypto led by Bitcoin and Etheruem. 

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Alan Scott is an expert in the FX market and has been working in the domain of stablecoins for many years.  

We have a self imposed constraint of 3 news stories per week because we serve busy senior Fintech leaders who just want succinct and important information.

For context on stablecoins please read this introductory interview with Alan “How stablecoins will change our world” and read articles tagged stablecoin in our archives. 

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