Money 2.0 Stuff: Trust me, I'm a DAO

Some time in the past 12-18 months, the cryptocurrency industry came to the collective realization that cryptocurrencies have no innate value and the ultimate success of any given coin and its associated blockchain comes down to its ability to build a network effect-driven monetary premium, right? While that’s mostly true, it’s not quite the entire story. Bitcoin, Ether, Monero are not exactly direct substitutes. If I happen to be looking for hard money with increasingly precarious security guarantees, then I will be required to use Bitcoin. If I’d like to buy some illicit goods, my best bet is to use Monero. If I’d like to do some Open Finance stuff, I’m stuck with Ether. While each of these assets has the potential to serve as a fairly blank canvas for medium of exchange and store of value type properties, there are some important design nuances that make some more appropriate than others.

Stablecoins are quite boring by design, but they’re also interesting emerging case studies. By design, stablecoins should strive to be as fungible as possible. “You had one job, stablecoin!” which was to be stable and a bit boring. In the world of product design and development generally, the idea is to build something different. Yet if you build a different, exciting type of stablecoin you’ve basically messed up bigly.