The Duality of Man: Stables and High Leverage

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Earlier this week, Stripe acquired Bridge—a payment platform bridging fiat and stablecoins—for $1.1 billion. That’s the largest crypto acquisition to date. No biggie. (Can we talk about how well-positioned they are with the X handle @Stablecoin?)

Stablecoins were minted about a decade ago, but their growth has skyrocketed in the last five years, soaring from 2.4% to 53% in on-chain settlements. In Q2 alone, they processed nearly double Visa’s volume, with monthly transactions hitting the trillions. In the last 30 days, stablecoins transferred $2 trillion—a 39% increase from the previous month.

Crypto is proving to be the ultimate payment rail: fast, cheap, and borderless. Stablecoins empower not just traders but also people in developing countries by making cross-border transactions accessible. Even giants like PayPal are in on it with their stablecoin, PyUSD. At present, there are over 200 stablecoins distributed.

David Lu, co-founder of Drift, shared how some stablecoin projects are innovating: “There’s been a big paradigm shift in stablecoins. There’s a huge earning potential for stablecoin issuers with the dominant issuers earning the entire treasury rate on the backend. We’re seeing a lot of newer stablecoins passing some of their yields to the end user.”

“There’s also tokens like USDe, which people have likened to a stablecoin, but it’s similar to a hedge fund, running a basis trade and then, tokenizing it. There are going to be more tokenized assets that look like stablecoins.”

Yet, despite this growth, stablecoins still sit under a $200 billion market cap—just 0.155% of the estimated $129 trillion global money supply.

So, are we witnessing a turning point for money?

With stablecoins, we’re witnessing the birth of an internet-based financial system—one designed to solve the very problem money was created for: exchanging value in an increasingly complex, interconnected world.

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Just Driftings’

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• $MEW-PERP has 220K in volume in less than 24 hours. Trade $MEW. 

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