Good morning,
In a few hours, I’ll be on a panel about web3 at the Multicoin LP Summit. It was a good excuse to prepare some thoughts. So thanks to the team for having me. Last time, they posted videos of all the panels (you can see me and Amitt from Rarebits talk about NFTs here). If they do the same this year, I’ll share it when it’s out.
In other news, Coinbase has announced its regulated USD-coin, $USDC. Aside from accelerating the decline of USDT, this news is interesting for three reasons:
- ERC20 digital fiat is useful in the Ethereum ecosystem. If Coinbase, Gemini, and Paxos are successful in getting users onboarded to their digital fiats, dapps have a substantially larger crypto-onboarded userbase.
- While it’s easy to criticize lack of dapp users, the fact that every major digital fiat project has chosen to build on Ethereum (instead of another existing protocol or inventing their own) is good empirical evidence of the attractiveness of Ethereum versus everything else (at least at this point in time).
- Regulated stablecoins are not censorship resistant and USDC is no different. I wrote about this when GUSD and PAX were first announced here.
On to the update:
There’s a lot to the concept of “web3”. All of the complexity of building distributed systems and the relative excess of crypto “infrastructure” projects makes it even harder to understand. I want to propose a simplified model to think of web3, extol its possible virtues, and highlight a vulnerability that we don’t talk about much.
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USDT may or may not unwind, but its usefulness is at risk
Whether or not USDT implodes, its product market fit is being challenged from multiple directions. Regulated stablecoins are less risky for those operating in environments that do not require censorship resistance. Censorship resistant stablecoins are better for those that require censorship resistance.