Discussing some practical uses of stablecoins

1. If you want to keep most of your wealth outside of banks or other financial institutions, your options are limited. You can fill a vault with gold and cash, but this creates storage and transportation issues. You can hold Bitcoin and Ethereum, but you may not want your net worth to be affected by the wild price fluctuations of these major cryptocurrencies. Instead, you can hold USDC. You can put $1 billion worth of USDC in a crypto wallet on your phone and board a plane to take it anywhere.

2. Additionally, stablecoins improve the way we use money. If you live in one of the many countries in the world facing rapid inflation or unreliable financial institutions, holding digital dollars on a controlled device is a significant improvement over holding local currency in a risky banking system. If you work in one country and send money to family in another, stablecoins can provide a faster, more reliable, and almost free way to do so.

3. It also simplifies the merchant process. If I sell something to you online and want to charge you $5, I can charge 5 USDC, which is much lower than the fees I would usually pay for processing credit cards or bank transfers. Coinbase has introduced point-of-sale integration, allowing merchants to accept USDC payments with zero transaction costs, instead of the 2% to 3% they usually pay to accept credit cards.

4. Stablecoins also provide new ways of transacting that do not exist in our traditional financial system. One example is streaming payments. You usually have to wait two weeks or a month to get paid for work you've already completed, sometimes even longer if you've logged your hours and sent an invoice. Since we can easily transfer stablecoins between wallets, you can receive streaming payments from your employer, who deposits a small portion of your salary into your wallet daily, hourly, or even every minute.