The first wave of stablecoins isn't replacing fiat currency, but replacing money movement protocols.
Expect most teams to convert stablecoins once they receive it, but even then it's a cheap/fast money movement layer, especially globally. Even in US, cheaper and faster than wire.
To start, it's great for micropayments globally. There are examples where you want an API once and not again, and you don't want to create an account or link a credit card.
Cloudflare was one of our earliest partners, and they saw a critical need for it for web scraping by AI.
Fast, cheap money movement globally (compared to wire or ACH in US).
At this phase, stablecoins are largely best for easy money movement, but the money ends up in fiat.
We are seeing some examples of teams using it for payouts, e.g., Gusto and Deel both support stablecoin payouts. Expect that to grow, but still very early days.
To start, think that stablecoins are great for money movement, even if fiat is used on both sides. For example, Bridge (now part of Stripe) started with a stablecoin sandwich, where the stablecoin was just the money movement piece and both source and destination were fiat. That was cheaper and faster than the other ways to move money.
Most goods today are denominated in fiat, so stablecoins are a better fit than gold.
And at this stage, stablecoins are great for easy money movement (rather than holding in crypto). I actually think most people won't even know that crypto rails have been used to move their money, with stablecoins like tcp/ip for money movement.
Beyond crypto teams, we're seeing increasing use cases for more teams to use stablecoins to pay. For example, both Gusto and Deel (YC teams) are using stablecoins to offer worldwide payouts.
Our goal is to build crypto developer tools that bring millions of developers and billions of users into crypto (today, crypto has <50k active developers). If you're a developer, our job is to make it simple to build products, while providing the trust, scale, and usability that users depend on Coinbase on. Our teams work directly with our CEO (Brian Armstrong, YC S12).
We're looking for three sets of roles:
- Full stack engs for our Developer Platform Portal, Commerce, and Staking teams
- You have a passion for crypto (even if you're new to the space)
- You care deeply about developer experience (geeking out about things like SDK design)
- We move at the pace of a startup, with value to full stack skillset, shipping fast, total ownership
- Senior Product Manager, ex-engineer, who has built API products before and written documentation
Our goal is to build crypto developer tools that bring millions of developers and billions of users into crypto (today, crypto has <50k active developers). If you're a developer, our job is to make it simple to build products, while providing the trust, scale, and usability that users depend on Coinbase on. Our teams work directly with our CEO (Brian Armstrong, YC S12).
We're looking for three sets of roles:
- Full stack engs for our Developer Platform Portal, Commerce, and Staking teams
- You have a passion for crypto (even if you're new to the space)
- You care deeply about developer experience (geeking out about things like SDK design)
- We move at the pace of a startup, with value to full stack skillset, shipping fast, total ownership
- Senior Product Manager, ex-engineer, who has built API products before and written documentation
> A number of transactions looked enormous but turned out to be some form of washing e.g address X sends $100MM worth of bitcoin to two addresses, with ~$1k going to address Y and the rest going right back to address X.
Bitcoin is based on the UTXO model, and requires the full amount of an input to be sent. For example, I might need to transact 20 bitcoin even if I only need to pay 1 bitcoin, with 19 bitcoin being transacted to a "change" address.
On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates:
It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that's all we see.
One more to add is Reddit's Personal Finance, where this question gets asked a lot. The wiki (second link, search for Windfall) esp has a number of great articles on topics like this.
Coinbase (YC S12) | Cryptocurrency Exchange/Wallet/Custodian | Technical Product Managers and Engineers | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE
We're hiring engineers and technical product managers across our team. I product lead the Crypto team that manages all blockchain interactions for Coinbase (think adding assets, staking, governance, managing crypto infrastructure), as well as the USDC team.
For the Crypto product role specifically, we're looking for someone with a strong crypto interest/background and product experience. For the USDC team, we are looking for someone with a fintech background (crypto not required) for a Head of Stablecoin.
Great point. Would you argue the media landscape is the way it is due to incentives these select organizations face or the monopolistic nature of these companies?
Separately, you note the high concentration of media creation, but don't speak to the even higher concentration of media distribution (e.g., social media), which likely has its own influence on what is created.
It depends on what "diverse" means to you. I would say that Scientific American isn't the same as a partisan news channel.
But to the degree that an ad driven model and social media is the primary way news distribution happens, media incentives are monolithic for media organizations.
On a discursive note, if you are interested in media incentives, "All the News That's Fit to Sell" is a great book that goes into media incentives in previous eras. When the economies of scale for printing presses went up, media naturally became more centrist and less alarmist because a single paper had to appeal to a larger audience. It gives you a sense for the power of incentives in dictating what media is created/distributed.
1. There isn't a single media (often, when your tribe is against another, you view the opposition as monolithic rather than a spectrum composed of different viewpoints)
2. And they're not insane, editors and social media algorithms are rational and reacting to reader incentives (but it is "insane" to mistake media sources for a rational human, because most media is about covering extreme events[1])
This last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2].
I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives:
> As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open.
> I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done?
I've been writing a series called Notes to a Young Software Engineer, and handling burnout was one of my first posts.
Most importantly, see a licensed medical professional. Burnout is often confused for other health issues, and you may not be dealing with burnout, but rather a larger health issue (e.g., PTSD).
If it is truly burnout, some that work for me are treating my body well, cultivating human relationships, and addressing root causes at work.
Expect most teams to convert stablecoins once they receive it, but even then it's a cheap/fast money movement layer, especially globally. Even in US, cheaper and faster than wire.