7 hours ago
Eight decades of dollar past tin beryllium work arsenic a three-act play.
Act I was the Eurodollar—off-shore slope deposits that sprang up successful 1950s London truthful the Soviet bloc, European exporters, and yet each multinational could clasp dollars extracurricular U.S. regulation, spawning a multi-trillion-dollar shadiness banking base.
Act II was the Petrodollar. After 1974, OPEC’s determination to terms crude successful dollars hard-wired planetary vigor request to U.S. currency and gave Washington an automatic bid for its Treasury bills.
John deVadoss volition look successful the “IEEE x Consensus Research Symposium: What's adjacent successful Agentic AI?” astatine Consensus 2025 connected May 16 astatine 11:00am-12:30pm.
Act III is unfolding now. USD-backed Stabledollars (a.k.a. stablecoins)—on-chain tokens afloat collateralized by T-bills and cash—have leapt past $230 cardinal successful circulating proviso and, connected galore days, settee much worth than PayPal and Western Union combined. The dollar has reinvented itself again—this clip arsenic a monetary API: a permissionless, programmable portion that clears successful seconds for a fraction of a cent.
Follow the incentives and the signifier of the aboriginal appears. A Lagos merchant tin judge USDC connected her phone, skip 20% naira slippage, and restock inventory the aforesaid afternoon. A Singapore hedge money parks currency successful tokenized T-bill vaults yielding 4.9%, past routes those dollars into a swap astatine 8 a.m. New-York clip without a analogous bank. A Colombian gig idiosyncratic converts play wages to integer dollars, bypasses superior controls, and withdraws pesos astatine a vicinity ATM—no Friday-to-Monday lag, nary 7% remit fee.
Stablecoins haven’t replaced the banking system; they person tunneled astir its slowest, astir costly choke points.
Scale begets legitimacy. The GENIUS Act moving done the U.S. Senate would charter stable-coin issuers nationally and, for the archetypal time, unfastened a way to Fed maestro accounts. Treasury unit already exemplary a $2 trillion stable-coin interval by 2028—enough to rival the full Eurodollar banal of the aboriginal 1990s.
That projection is plausible: Tether and Circle bid implicit 90% stock with reserves lodged astir wholly successful short-dated U.S. debt, meaning foreigners are efficaciously holding digitized T-bills that settee successful 30 seconds. The dollar’s network-effect is migrating from SWIFT messages to smart-contract calls, extending hegemony without printing a azygous caller note.
Yet, the Stabledollar epoch is nary risk-free triumph. Private tokens that wrapper sovereign wealth rise hard questions. Who conducts monetary argumentation erstwhile a 3rd of the offshore interval lives successful astute contracts? What recourse does a Venezuelan household person if an issuer black-lists its wallet? Will Europe—or the BRICS—tolerate a rails-level dependence connected a U.S.-regulated asset? These are governance puzzles, but they are solvable if policymakers dainty stablecoins arsenic captious dollar infrastructure, not arsenic speculative irritants.
The playbook is straightforward:
- Impose Basel-style superior and liquidity rules connected issuers.
- Post real-time reserve attestations on-chain truthful collateral is transparent by default.
- Mandate inter-operability crossed blockchains to forestall winner-take-all custodianship.
- Extend FDIC-like security to tokenized deposits truthful end-users bask the aforesaid information nett arsenic with slope accounts.
Do that, and the United States creates a digital-dollar moat wider than immoderate rival’s CBDC, including China’s. Shrug, and issuance volition migrate offshore, leaving Washington to constabulary a shadiness strategy it nary longer controls.
Dollar hegemony has ever precocious by hitching itself to the ascendant commercialized travel of the age: Eurodollars financed post-war reconstruction; petrodollars lubricated the fossil-fuel century; Stabledollars are wiring the high-velocity, software-eaten economy. Ten years from now, you won’t see them; they volition simply beryllium the h2o we aquatics in. Your section café volition punctuation prices successful pesos oregon pounds but settee successful tokenized dollars nether the hood. Brokerages volition merchantability “notes” that are truly bearer instruments programmable for collateral calls. Payroll volition get successful a wallet that auto-routes savings, investments, and charitable gifts the instant it clears.
The lone unfastened question is whether the United States volition steward the upgrade it accidentally birthed. Stablecoins are already the fastest-growing quasi-sovereign plus class. Harness them with superior rules and the dollar’s 3rd large reinvention writes itself. Ignore them, and that aboriginal inactive arrives—just without the U.S. successful the driver’s seat.
English (US) 