June 11, 2025 ☼ Crypto ☼ Payments
In the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of chatter about whether stablecoins offer anything beyond regulatory arbitrage. Critics argue they’re just slick wrappers around fiat, used to dodge capital controls or skirt around legacy infrastructure. And beyond use cases in high-inflation or emerging economies, they don’t offer much. But I think the real potential of stablecoins lies in eliminating that divide between banking and finance.
Say you send me $50 after dinner, that money just sits there. Why shouldn’t it be auto-invested into a low-risk, on-chain ETF the second it hits my wallet? Why shouldn’t I be able to redeem or spend it instantly too?
Yield-bearing stablecoins felt like a first step in that direction. But after conversations with yield-bearing stablecoin issuers (like the now-acquired USDM team) and some deeper research into smart contract design, I quickly realized how operationally complex this was. The mechanics of distributing yield across tokens that are constantly moving between wallets is messy. And that’s before you even get to the legal questions - are they securities or not?
Maybe the path toward merging banking and finance doesn’t begin with merging payments and finance? Maybe we need some clear lines, like a stablecoin that’s purpose-built for payments and another for investing. Through conversations I’ve had with teams at Circle, I learnt about something along those lines: users accept USDC payments, have their tokens auto-converted on Coinbase into yield-bearing assets like USDY. That kind of flow moves us in the right direction.
But it still isn’t the whole picture! The real unlock would be a system that blends the ease of Venmo with the investment rails of Robinhood, where money both moves and grows without friction and liquidity management is managed efficiently in the background and users barely notice.
There’s been real progress in the last few months. Wallets are getting more user-friendly: better abstraction, better UX. Payments teams are already building on this. So are stablecoin-native retail trading apps. When all these pieces click together, we might actually get to that integrated Robinhood-Venmo world. And bringing those stablecoin use cases into the real world is what we’re building toward at Miruvor.