“Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.” – Terry Pratchett
IN THIS NEWSLETTER
The fuel for stablecoin statecraft
Term of the day: diesel
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Where have stablecoins made the biggest inroads in cross-border flows? Indexed against fiat weight, stablecoin B2C runs at 5.3x in APAC, 3.5x in EMEA and 1.4x in the Americas.
Find out more by downloading the full report: Stablecoins in Cross-Border Payments
Get weekly onchain data and more analysis like this from the Allium Research team on Substack.
Hi everyone, and happy Friday! So glad it’s finally the weekend, it’s been a fuzzy week (you might have noticed the late sends 😖). I hope you have good things planned!
WHAT I’M WATCHING
The fuel for stablecoin statecraft
The stablecoin adoption story is getting even more interesting.
Yesterday, Bloomberg ran an article with the following opening:
“The Trump administration is considering an initiative to promote the use of dollar-denominated stablecoins overseas, according to people familiar with the plans”
Promote? What does that mean?
According to the report, it would be via joint ventures with private sector firms, and would potentially involve the US Treasury, the US State Department and the US International Development Finance Corp (DFC). No further details were given.
For now it’s unconfirmed, relying on “people familiar”. And it does defy many of our cherished beliefs on sovereignty and the role of the state in business.
But by now we should be getting used to that. What’s more, the idea ties together, although not exactly neatly, many of the crypto-geopolitical threads swirling behind headlines and recent posts by those of us swimming in this intersection.
To explore how this could play out and where my thinking is changing, I’m going to weave a winding path broken into blocks which I’ll call the “three Ds”: the DFC, dollar dominance and diesel.
