От Circle до OUSD: стратегия нападения и защиты на треке стейблкоинов

Recently, a piece of news has caused some ripples in both the crypto ecosystem and the US stock market.

It is reported that over 140 companies, including payment giants Stripe/Tempo, credit card giants Visa and Mastercard, asset management giant BlackRock, and major crypto exchange Coinbase, jointly initiated the establishment of the Open Standard Alliance, launching a new stablecoin called Open USD (OUSD).

This news has sparked many comments on X, with quite a few people believing that Circle's position is threatened by this alliance and OUSD.

In a previous FAQ article, I shared my views on Circle:

I don’t have much confidence in its business model, so I never bought its stock.

As of today, I still haven’t bought its stock, but I have been keeping a certain level of attention on it. So after seeing this news, I took the opportunity to organize my thoughts again.

Although I haven’t bought its stock and still have many questions about it, I believe that this new stablecoin initiated by such alliances will ultimately have little impact on Circle’s position.

My reasons are mainly two:

The first reason is a rule of thumb I have always believed in—in a new ecosystem, the final top players are almost always native entrepreneurial teams of the new ecosystem, and rarely come from old-world players.

In the stablecoin track, who are the native entrepreneurial teams?

In my view, the three strongest are: USDT, USDC, and DAI/USDS.

It’s also possible that new native teams will emerge in the future.

Beyond that, entities like Stripe, MasterCard, etc., all belong to old-world players. They are likely to be constrained by “experience” and produce something that is neither here nor there.

There is no technical obstacle to issuing stablecoins; the difficulty lies in usage and promotion. And such usage and promotion require a unique crypto ethos—something that old-world players seriously lack, or frankly, do not possess at all.

Therefore, Circle’s threat is unlikely to come from products created by these old-world player alliances.

The second reason is that, generally speaking, most of these alliances are all bark and no bite. On the surface, they come from different industries, gather different needs, and can create something more widely accepted. Such a background is an advantage in legislation and regulation, but in the commercial field, it is often a disadvantage, because such loose alliances often find it difficult to effectively drive commercial implementation.

The likely situation for OUSD in the future is: it will have application scenarios and real usage, but it will be hard to shake USDC’s position.

So this news can actually be ignored entirely.

As for Circle, besides not fully understanding some aspects of its business model, I also have reservations about its team.

Circle’s founding team is undoubtedly excellent, but it still falls short of my expectations.

This may stem from some obsession of mine—the crypto ecosystem is a brand new world, a world that can provide unique conditions for the birth of great enterprises in history. So I always look forward to seeing remarkable people and remarkable companies emerge in this ecosystem.

What “remarkable” means is hard to articulate, but what is “not so remarkable” is easy to see.

What makes me feel that Circle’s team is “not so remarkable”?

It is that they launched their own Layer 1 blockchain to create their own payment chain.

In the crypto ecosystem, the easiest thing is to issue a token, and the second easiest is to build a chain.

Is it okay to issue a token? Of course, if needed, a token should be issued; but if it’s not needed at all, does the team have the courage to hold back and not issue a token?

Similarly, is it okay to build a chain? Of course, if needed, a chain should be built; but if it’s not needed at all, does the team have the courage to resist the temptation and not build a chain?

In the stablecoin field, an obvious path is to build one’s own blockchain, because “stablecoins need payment channels,” so building a chain becomes a “natural” thing.

Stripe built its own chain, Plasma is also a chain...

But in my view, most of these blockchains claiming to be dedicated to the payment track will ultimately prove to be futile. By “useless” I don’t mean worthless, but that many of them will see some usage but occupy a very small market share.

Old-world players entering this track easily fall into the trap of building a chain. If a native team doesn’t even see this trap and jumps in anyway, it indicates that the team’s caliber is somewhat mediocre.

For a company, when it has ample resources and abundant capital, it is often easy to do what it wants, but it is very difficult to resist temptation and not do something.

Unfortunately, Circle did not escape this.

So in my eyes, it is not so remarkable.

I still don’t fully understand its business model, and its corporate culture and traits are not that appealing to me, so I have been a bystander all along.