If you've ever wondered how stablecoins will go mainstream, this tells you.
There is a lot going on in crypto these days, from bitcoin retaking $80,000, to Haun Ventures raising $1 billion for a new crypto VC fund, to Congress making progress on the CLARITY Act. But amid all the excitement, there are two recent stories I can't get out of my head:
DoorDash is bringing stablecoin-powered payments to 40+ countries
Meta is rolling out stablecoin payouts for creators in the Philippines and Colombia
On a relative basis, these are not a big deal. Both are pilot projects and the dollar amounts are small. But they've answered a question I've had about stablecoins for a long time. They’ve also increased my confidence that stablecoins will scale to trillions in assets and hundreds of millions of users. And perhaps most importantly, they’ve given me a new window into what the real killer app of stablecoins is.
From Here to There
Stablecoin assets hover around $300 billion today. Popular projections see them reaching as high as $4 trillion by 2030. To get there, stablecoins will have to expand beyond their current primary use case of crypto trading and be embraced for everyday activity, like payments.
They are making progress. Startups like ARQ provide easy dollar access to stablecoins in emerging markets for more than two million users. Yellowcard powers B2B transactions in the Southern Hemisphere using stablecoins, and is growing quickly.
But to really scale to hundreds of millions of users, stablecoins are going to need the support of very large players.
The Stories
DoorDash operates a tremendously complex business in 40+ countries, coordinating billions of payments between customers, merchants, and drivers—tips, refunds, constant worker turnover. It has 10 million Dashers who make deliveries.
Imagine the operational nightmare of onboarding and offboarding 10 million contractors across 40 different banking systems, currencies, and payroll regimes. To make it easier, the company is now partnering with Stripe to explore making these payments using stablecoins. To pay a Dasher, all it will take is a wallet address.
Meta faces the same problem. It pays content creators across Instagram and other platforms in 100+ countries—creators who come and go, work their own hours, and span dozens of currencies. It doesn’t disclose specific numbers, but reports put the global creator economy at 200+ million contributors. Paying this many people is hugely difficult, so Meta is now exploring paying them in stablecoins via Solana and Polygon, starting in Colombia and the Philippines, with plans to expand from there.
The Killer App Nobody Talks About
These stories reveal something important that I think most people miss.
We tend to justify stablecoins by saying they're cheaper and faster. I can almost hear myself give the pitch: With stablecoins, I can send money instantly around the world for $0.01; a traditional bank wire takes 2–5 business days and can cost $30. That's true, and it's amazing.
But the reason DoorDash and Meta are exploring stablecoins isn't mainly the cost savings. It's also that stablecoins make global payments simple—one wallet address, no banking infrastructure, no currency conversions. For a global business managing millions of micropayments, that type of simplicity is worth a lot.
I suspect all global tech companies with distributed gig workers will follow DoorDash and Meta on this path. In the process, they’d help bring millions of users into the crypto ecosystem.
And ultimately, that will be the biggest impact. Stablecoins are crypto's most powerful on-ramp. Once someone has a stablecoin wallet, bitcoin and DeFi are one click away. Getting stablecoins into the hands of tens or hundreds of millions of people will cement crypto as a permanent part of the world's financial infrastructure and dramatically expand the audience for crypto investing.
These pilot projects suggest exactly how we’ll get there.
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