Stablecoin proponents talk as though the battle over payments is over. Netflix twice offered itself to Blockbuster for under $100 million. Blockbuster said no.
Alpha Score of 43 reflects weak overall profile with poor momentum, weak value, strong quality, moderate sentiment.
Reed Hastings is worth billions because Netflix survived. Twice the company offered itself to Blockbuster for under $100 million. Blockbuster said no. The experts did not buy Hastings out when they could have.
The true driver of Hastings' wealth is a reminder of how little the present predicts the future of business.
Stablecoin proponents would do well to internalize that. They talk and write as though the battle over payments is already over and stablecoins have won. They routinely claim the digital money exists as an existential threat to traditional money center banks. Confident in that supposition, they say the big banks are playing Washington to squash the stablecoin warehouses that would allegedly replace them in a free market.
The conceit is obnoxious. See Netflix, among countless other business stories, to understand why.
The future of commerce is never a sure thing. What tends to shape it is rarely a known quantity. Stablecoin advocates would be wise to contain their glee.
The biggest banks have already entered the stablecoin space themselves, or they intend to. And stablecoins are hardly novel. They are a digital version of the dollar, not a new approach to money that replaces fiat.
That makes it hard to take seriously the view that dollar derivatives are a threat to traditional banking. There is nothing here that banks could not expertly improve upon if need be.
Stablecoin advocates will reply that the Genius Act, prohibiting interest payments on stablecoin holdings, was a "below the belt punch" banks used to crush digital currency competition. That is hard to take seriously too.
Implicit in the notion that limits on stablecoin interest payments crushed a substantive threat to traditional banks is the idea that the future of payments is certain, and that members of the pundit class know what it is. That is not serious.
The prohibition of interest payments on stablecoins ignores why the big banks desire it. It has little to do with fear of competition. It has a lot to do with non-banks presuming to operate as banks minus the rules and regulations that traditional banks endure.
"Is the Albanian Army going to take over the world? I don't think so." That was former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in 2010, asked if Netflix was a threat to the giants of Hollywood. Readers know the rest of the story.
Stablecoin proponents seem not to. If they did, they would not be making such grandiose statements about the future of banking and money that they could not possibly know.
Prepared with AlphaScala editorial tooling from the source reporting linked above. Indexable analysis may include a cited Alpha Score value. Publishing checks screen each story before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.