Stablecoin good. …yes, and, what else? A currency is a claim about how people will be governed. When that claim fails, savings leave, and the market gets paid to take the order; not to call ahead. Like the acceleration of software, whether that speed is good is a different paper. This one is about what the official sector does when it finally sees the flow — and who still has the rail after.

The ideas that actually work at venture scale must necessarily sound really dumb when they're first tried This implies the existence of sufficient unexplored territory and potential edge But most dumb sounding ideas won't actually work Therein lies the art I suppose

For almost 3 years now, we predicted @sphere_labs that USD/USDC(T) on/off-ramps would eventually compress to their "idiot index" — which is close to, but, critically, not actually 0. There didn't seem like any fundamental economic reason why this wouldn't end up happening. So, then, how do you make money as a stablecoin-adjacent company? It appears the industry is now gathering around the classical answers of deposit yield, credit, compliance-as-a-service and similar. These are not wrong, and quite under-explored — for good reason as there's something to be said about how being too-early is the same thing as being wrong. Yet, we would predict again that we are in the early innings of how stablecoins will fork off the well-trodden monetization and expansion arc that was last explored during the 2010s era of fintech. Once the pre-conditions are met, there is a whole new world of win-win monetization methods that expand the pie. Cheers to the @stabledash team for giving us the opportunity to contribute to this report, and for addressing one of the biggest elephants in the room for the industry.

Sad but not surprised to see that CLARITY did not pass. Policy understandably is laggy in response to new technology with deep disruptive potential, but the biggest winners of a continued regulatory limbo state will be the ones pushing the risk envelope the furthest. This is not a commentary on whether pushing this particular envelope is net good or bad, but more-so of an observation that it is increasingly on the industry to self-regulate (or not) in pursuit of its fragmented goal set. In that sense, it is analogous to AI — and more broadly representative of how the historic imbalance of computational complexity in appropriate oversight vs. range of technology disruption is widening as better software recursively makes time & activity go faster. It will be interesting to see how the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of this non-event will play out on international crypto regulation & general commercial behavior. On the bright side, I suspect that there is a chance that this extends the window of positive highly-disruptive change before the frame is fully carved; though it remains unclear where existing market incentives will land in terms of what gets shipped.

Chasing down extra KYC/B documents and then playing a game of telephone while waiting for them to get reviewed by various regulated institutions in a particular funds flow is one of the most frustrating and least-addressed components of on/off-ramps. The issue is that it's structural — as systems scale, it gets really difficult to ensure a delightful user experience without overcorrecting a general-purpose risk engine. This is particularly true in emerging markets, where submitted documents often subscribe to different and ever-evolving standards, as case precedent is typically more nascent, documents are in different languages, and review processes often require bespoke workflows to meet customers where they are. This is the first of many technical initiatives that we're taking to make onboarding great again. While the feature will go fully live on Oct 19, the updated endpoints and their new fields are available for testing — existing integrators can find the full technical guide in the linked blog post on the @sphere_labs website.