I said many times here, they my biggest mistake was to know too much. Knowing what Tether ponzi was, I thought it would be shut down and then the whole crypto market would plummet. Never could have imagined it would be allowed to go this far.
congrats to all those who invested early!!!
We will see one way or the other how it will play out. But when 2 trillion valuations is based on a lie and fraud, can it be sustained indefinitely???? Will it be a self fulfilling prophecy? Time will tell.
Risk with stable coin pegs is probably the biggest concern I came across when learning about crypto. I like the tech, I am really confident that we will see what increasing adoption, risks/barriers to entry will slowly get removed so inflows from less tech-savvy investors will continue, governments have limited ability to blockade crypto…
That really just leaves the peg breaking on a major stable coin. Crypto would recover even from that, but for sure it would have a ton of negative market impact. Why do you decide to settle on calling it a ponzi though? Sure it’s not fully collateralized, but because it’s a widely accepted medium to get in and out of crypto, the market is willing to discount a little risk. It seems like a prisoner’s dilemma to me and everyone has chosen to cooperate and will still absorb stable coins for USD. It’s not like millions of people are denominations their life savings in stable coins.
Pegs can take a bit of strain if they have utility, but usually when they do break, they break quickly. So I don’t think we’ll see USDT start trading at 0.95 and everyone who is concerned can make an orderly exit. That is a risk. OTOH I think we are past peak risk with tethers; there is so much institutional money and infrastructure is miles ahead of a few years ago. Everyone knows stablecoins are very important and would definitely assist in repairing the damage if they started to lose security there.
People buy junk bonds for less yield that stablecoins are paying, and hold USD that is diluted with an even greater fury than stablecoin custodians do. The risk is known and priced in, evidenced by the higher yields on the coins vs. your 0.2% at the bank for USD. Nothing is riskless but if this is the fear keeping anyone pinned at 0% allocation I’d recommend moving beyond that even to just a few % order to capture some diversification and get exposure to developing tech that could make a huge social impact if it’s used in the right way.
Life is full of risks and this one isn’t extremely outsized on a relative basis like you’re making it out to be. Does the US market where $1 of inflows creates $5-$10 in market impact and the underlying currency was expanded by 50% in the last two years or whatever the figure is seem THAT much more riskless?