Stablecoins Are Growing Up
Circle, slangy wealth management chatbots, private credit runs, SEC climate rules and OCC desk space.
I have always thought of stablecoins as basically unregulated non-interest-paying crypto banks. The idea of a stablecoin is that there is a company, the stablecoin issuer, and you send the company dollars, and it gives you back tokens (“stablecoins”). Each token is supposed to be worth a dollar, and if you hand the issuer back a token it will hand you back a dollar.1 But mostly you hold onto the stablecoins and the issuer holds onto your dollars. You both arguably benefit from this:
But yesterday Circle Internet Group Inc., the big US-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, filed publicly for an initial public offering. It has previously filed confidentially, but its prospectus is available now. It is an interesting read, and it has caused me to update my model of stablecoins in two respects: