With the price of BTC approaching a new high of $112,000, and the US stablecoin regulatory bill, the Genius Act, also ready to go, the crypto industry is further deeply coupled with the global economic system, and it is only at this time that people realize: the payment system is the crown of the crypto industry, and BTC is the jewel in the crown. This is also one of the reasons why PayFi, U Card, and RWA have become the must-attend places for exchanges and crypto project owners to gather as the mainstreamization of crypto assets accelerates. In the future, independent payment solutions based on real-world industry segments may become possible.
The Great Stablecoin Change: 10 Years of Old Crypto Originating in USDT (2014-2024)
In 2008, an article titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) appeared on the P2P Foundation website, its It was signed by Satoshi Nakamoto, the man the crypto industry has come to revere as its grandmaster. The article came at a time when the world economy was slowly rebuilding itself after the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which was caused by the inflation of the US dollar. Undoubtedly, the original intention of BTC was to solve the disease of centralized money supply system and the long, rigid and rigid global financial payment system.
But beyond the expectations of many crypto OGs, including Satoshi Nakamoto, the final fulfillment of “BTC’s last wish of peer-to-peer payment” is not BTC, which holds up the banner of decentralization, but rather all kinds of stable coins that are strongly bound to the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt.
USDT’s Rise: Surrounding Cities in Rural Areas, Capturing Markets by Example
Looking at the history of Tether’s rise, we can roughly categorize it as a “three-step strategy”:
(1) From crypto blood to crypto oil
In October 2014, Tether was founded and its core product was USDT, a stablecoin based on the Bitcoin Omni protocol;
In February 2015, USDT was launched on Bitfinex, the trading platform with the largest bitcoin trading volume at that time, and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, was also the CTO of Bitfinex, and the two companies have been regarded as “brother companies” by the outside world because of the high degree of overlap of team members;
In 2018, Tether issued USDT based on the ERC 20 standard on Ether, which is compatible with the original protocol and further improves its ease of use. Since then, Tether and USDT have started to gradually penetrate the crypto ecosystem like crypto blood with the help of the ether ecosystem development.
In 2019, Wavefield TRON and Tether were successfully married, and since then, Wavefield TRON has begun to roar on the way to the head ecology of the stablecoin network, and the former has become a heavyweight cooperative network that occupies more than one-third of USDT’s issuance volume, and Wavefield’s founder, Sun Yuchen, has also made Wavefield TRON leap into one of the cryptocurrency infrastructures through the pre-coin spreading strategy.
It can be said that after the early redemption fee profit model has been successfully verified, Tether has established its own competitive barriers and business model through USDT, and has gradually become a crypto ecological network of oil raw materials in general, the transaction equivalent.
(2) From Crypto to More Than Crypto
In 2020, with the outbreak of DeFi Summer, the market capitalization scale of stable coins has been rising, and those who seize the opportunity to reap the dividends are naturally Tether and USDT, and Tether’s ambition is no longer limited to the crypto world, but is gradually expanding to a wider scope.
As we mentioned in the article “”The First Stablecoin“ USDT Market Value Hits New Highs, Uncovering the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars of Business Empire Behind Tether” (https://www.odaily.news/post/5198855), the use of USDT includes cryptocurrencies, general equivalents, inflationary regions, and other areas of the world. USDT is used in general equivalents, alternative currencies in inflationary areas, and as a major payment tool in cross-border trade, etc. In addition, after obtaining massive profits, Tether has further extended itself to the entire world’s economic system through various types of investments, acquisitions, U.S. debt reserves, gold reserves, and BTC reserves to strengthen its ties with the crypto world. This is also one of the important reasons why USDT has been criticized as “an accomplice to money laundering”. After all, money never sleeps, and the same is true of USDT.
(3) From means of payment to store of value
In 2021, after reaching a settlement with the New York State Attorney General’s Office (NYAG) and paying the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s $41 million fine, Tether stage-by-stage cleared the biggest obstacle on the road to its own development, and since then, the value of USDT began to gradually escalate from a means of payment to a store of value. After the de-anchoring fiasco and the reserve asset Fud, Tether’s USDT has become one of the few hoarded coins in the high-risk, high-volatility crypto market – the other being BTC – and has gained popularity among the crypto-crowd, especially with its constant buying of US bonds, 1:1 bond with the US dollar and brand recognition. The crypto-crowd eventually recognized BTC, and the billions or even tens of billions of dollars in profits each year gave it the strength it needed to win the “Twin Dollar” award.
From once a wildly growing crypto project to the dominant stablecoin of today, Tether and USDT have staged a wonderful drama of “encircling the city from the countryside and capturing the market by example”.
USDC’s Second Path: Centralized Development, Crypto IPOs
Unlike Tether’s USDT, Circle and its stablecoin USDC, which was founded on Coinbase, have taken a very different path: building everything for compliance.
In addition to the regular U.S. debt reserves, Circle’s profit model is undoubtedly more fragile than Tether’s. After all, Coinbase, Binance and other partners can eat a large portion of its earnings, which is one of the key reasons why it pushed for the listing of the crypto IPO after Trump came to power – only Seize the existing advantages of compliance, in time to expand their basic disk from the field of cryptocurrency to the traditional financial market, in order to obtain stronger bargaining power and in the subsequent market competition to obtain more powerful funds, resources and even policy support.
In addition to the two market giants, USDT and USDC, from the early days of the market, TrueUSD (TUSD), Circle Coin (USDC), Gemini Dollar (GUSD), and Paxos (PAX), to today’s still occupying a certain market, DAI (MakerDAO), USDS (Sky), USDe (Ethena), PYUS (PYUS), and PYUS (PYUS), the market for cryptocurrencies has been growing. Ethena), PYUSD (PayPal), RLUSD (Ripple), USD1 (WLFI) and other stablecoin projects, about this piece of lucrative “cake” competition is undoubtedly becoming increasingly fierce, and who can really stand invincible or become the ultimate winner, is still to be regulatory The test of policy and the verification of time.
https://defillama.com/stablecoins
U.S. Genius Act Kicks Off Wave of Stablecoin Regulation: Filling in the Last Piece of Crypto Regulation
For all stablecoin projects, the Genius Act, a stablecoin regulatory bill recently voted by the U.S. Senate, is undoubtedly the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, and after bitcoin spot ETFs and ethereum spot ETFs have become a part of the traditional institutional funding allocation positions, the bill will undoubtedly be fill in the last piece of the Trump administration’s crypto regulation.
Specifically, in my personal opinion, the main purpose of the genius bill is to:
- to ensure the hegemony of the dollar. As a big fan of “America First”, Trump, members of his administration and even members of the Democratic Party, the core purpose is still to ensure the political and economic hegemony of the U.S., and the main medium to achieve this is the U.S. dollar. A stablecoin, tied 1:1 to the dollar, is one of the best tools for doing this.
- Ensure that the stablecoin system operates under the jurisdiction of the United States. Now that the crypto-friendly environment has been established, the U.S. is becoming a crypto hotspot again, which will help the U.S. to take the initiative in the stablecoin system and regulatory policymaking, and then, just as in the case of the foreign trade regulations, the U.S. will be able to suppress the global crypto economy and even cross-border trade through the stablecoin system.
- Ensure the partial security of the crypto-financial system. This is also one of the important reasons why the Genius Act has been positively recognized by many industry players and representatives of the traditional financial industry. The mandatory 1:1 full asset reserve and the strict prohibition of misappropriation and repledging, the release of reserve reports at least once a month and the introduction of high-frequency disclosure of external audits, the banking level regulatory licenses and the introduction of custodian institutions after the circulating market cap exceeds $10 billion, and other provisions will add another layer to the stablecoin track. The stablecoin circuit will add one safety lock after another. Whether or not the door behind the locks is strong is, of course, another question.
- It greatly opens up the imagination of the RWA circuit and brings the on-chain and off-chain worlds closer together. It could be argued that stablecoins were the earliest RWA products, and the real-world asset they were tied to was the U.S. dollar currency. With the Genius Act gradually coming into effect, the launch and implementation of RWA-related legislation is not too far away, and compared to the current cryptocurrency market of more than $3 trillion, it will be a multi-trillion-dollar asset market.
In this regard, the Genius Act will provide policy dividends for the U.S. government and the U.S. economy to develop the digital economy, explore the potential of digital assets, and encourage the development of crypto projects, giving rise to a number of promising crypto projects and the teams behind them. The geniuses who are responsible for the future of crypto may be hidden among them.
Crypto’s new decade: finance is still the main line, and crypto concept stocks and stock tokenization are promising.
In 2025, the percentage of crypto people in the global population has already peaked, and cryptocurrency investment is still a game for a few people; but on the other hand, in the commercial society, everyone has a natural need for commodity exchange, where commodities can be tangible products and goods, as well as intangible labor, virtual assets, and digital IPs, etc. So based on such a need, a more convenient, low-cost, and safer cryptocurrency will be the key to the future. Therefore, based on such needs, more convenient, low-cost and safer crypto payments will eventually penetrate into everyone’s daily life.
In the next 10 years (2025-2035), the main line of the cryptocurrency industry may gradually shrink to the financial sector from the multiple tracks and fields that were falsified by the previous market, and as a result, crypto concept stocks based on crypto IPOs as well as the tokenization of stocks will become the new front of the cryptocurrency industry.
At some level, the stocks of Strategy, Sol Strategy, Metaplanet and other listed companies have already become “dichotomous carriers” of crypto concept stocks and stock tokenization, and their potential value will be further released after the value of BTC is affirmed in a wider range and even at a higher price. The potential value of BTC will be further unlocked when its value is recognized on a wider scale and at a higher price.
Of course, as far as the naked eye can see, the ETH ecosystem and Solana ecosystem are still the mainstream choice for the industry.
Conclusion: Satoshi Nakamoto’s “legacy” has finally been realized, but the way to achieve it is the opposite of what it should be
At the end of this article, it’s still hard to avoid the fact that Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, is a crypto giant who has disappeared from the market’s radar, and the masterpiece of his “BTC peer-to-peer payment system” is undoubtedly the stablecoin.
Ironically, the crypto-punk at heart could not have predicted that BTC, which was created to counter the unchecked and ever-increasing minting power of authoritarian governments, would give rise to a more “dollar-centered, U.S.-debt-guaranteed” stablecoin system.
