Much has been written about Open USD, or OUSD, the new stablecoin announced by Open Standard. Most of it seems to focus on the 140 businesses - including massive global banks and payments businesses - among them FNB, Nedbank and Absa - who have signed up as Open Standard partners. This seems to me to be missing the point. What I think is underplayed is Stripe's role and the bigger picture, and that's what I want to unpack. There are four things to think about here. First is t

Money used to be issued and enabled by single entities: your bank creates money by lending against fractional reserves, it controls your experience with it, and facilitates its use. With stablecoins, this whole stack is getting unbundled. The problem is that version 1 of stablecoins had everything bundled together, and so that – and our acquired instinct for how banks work – has shaped how we think about stablecoins. This gives us a set of intuitions about stablecoins and the

(boring pie chart) When my father dropped me off at college, just before he left for the drive home, he said to me “I wish I was where you are now, knowing what I know now”. I am sure it is a sentiment that anyone over a certain age has experienced, but it occurred to me that this is a pattern in everything, not just personal experience. Take finance. It is obvious now that financial services will be tokenised. Consumers may not see it, or even know it, but the financial prod

We make sense of the new by relating it to the familiar. This is a great approach for user interfaces, but when you are trying to...