Stablecoins: What Are the Two Main Use Cases?
Macro guru Lynn Alden says stablecoins currently have two main use cases this decade.
In a new interview with Anthony Pompliano, Alden says that as a digital representation of currencies, stablecoins are critical to the operation of crypto exchanges.
“Stablecoins fill two important roles right now. One is as a unit of account for many trading platforms – centralized offshore exchanges or some of the DeFi [decentralized finance] markets.
It’s essentially a digital representation of the dollar. I’m not talking about the algorithmic variety, but the actual fiat-backed variety. It’s just dollars in a kind of more efficient wrapper.”
Alden also says that in some countries, stablecoins are also used to minimize the impact of volatile currencies.
“The second use case that actually interested me more is that people in emerging markets or frontier markets, in countries with volatile currencies, stablecoins are useful for them to hold for intermediate savings.
I had an Argentinian who described it to me very well: the money I’m going to spend in less than a month, I’m going to hold in local currency. The money I will hold for a few months I will hold in stablecoins, and the money I want to take home in three to five years I will put in Bitcoin (BTC).”
She says the nascent asset class is making the U.S. dollar more accessible, especially with the advent of technologies like Lightning Labs’ Taro protocol, which could facilitate the cheap transfer of greenbacks through the Bitcoin network.
READ MORE: Russia’s Central Bank is Against Stablecoins
”I think that there is a demand for dollars globally and stablecoins just happen to be the technology that allows them to get their hands on dollars even if their governments and their banking networks are not making them available or trying to restrict access. I do think that stablecoins have that purpose this decade.
That’s why I also think that there’s cool things like Taro on Lighting that could potentially bring stablecoins over to Bitcoin and it just becomes whatever network is most efficient to transact those dollars around because those are less about pure decentralization and more about what can give people access to a cheap ability to access that foreign central hub of dollars.”
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
