(ID: iqklbs), Author: Hu Tao, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Taking the trading volume on May 14 as an example, USDT’s trading volume reached 215.7 billion yuan, more than 30 times higher than that of all other stablecoins. The problems are well known, but its dominance in the global cryptocurrency industry is still quite strong, and other stablecoins have little real impact and impact.

At the same time, TUSD, GUSD, USDC and other emerging stablecoins attempting to challenge the dominance of USDT have made some progress and results, but judging from the overall situation of the industry, these actions have basically failed in stages.

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Turning the time back to October 15th last year, the price of USDT plunged by 13% due to market panic. At that time, emerging stablecoins such as GUSD had just obtained the license from the New York regulatory authority, and they were concentrated on Coinbase, Binance, Huobi and other transactions. Place.

At that time, the article "Kick USDT off the Iron Throne" written by the chain catcher wrote that this means that the world's mainstream exchanges have successively opened the door to emerging stablecoins, so that emerging stablecoins have the opportunity to compete with USDT on the same dimension and become A major breakthrough in the history of stablecoins. But now, this judgment is still too optimistic.

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Issuance and transaction of some mainstream stablecoins (statistics from coinmarketcap)

Over the past six months, these emerging stablecoins have indeed done a lot of fruitful work. Since USDT has always been criticized for its security, including issues such as whether the USDT issuer has overissued and whether the U.S. dollar reserve is sufficient, almost all major emerging stablecoins make a big fuss about compliance and security. Trying to make users believe that their own stable currency is safer, and then use their own stable currency.

These measures include obtaining regulatory licenses, regularly issuing audit reports, launching a real-time fund verification platform, etc., and various data can prove that these emerging stablecoins have sufficient US dollar reserves, there is no excessive issuance, and their performance is far better than USDT, but the reality shows that more compliant and secure emerging stablecoins still fail to win the favor of users.

Although these emerging stablecoins are able to compete with USDT on the same platform, their number of trading pairs has always been quite limited, and they only have trading pairs of some mainstream currencies, and they have never had a trading area like USDT. This may be because Emerging stablecoins do not meet the requirements of exchanges in terms of influence and liquidity. On the other hand, it may be that the "lobbying" attack of stablecoin issuers on exchanges is not strong enough.

The direct result of the above-mentioned reasons is that the user volume, transaction volume and liquidity of major emerging stablecoins are far inferior to USDT, and there is no obvious sign that any stablecoin has a chance to catch up with USDT.

Therefore, on the battlefield of cryptocurrency exchanges, USDT has won a phased victory in the stablecoin competition, but this does not mean that other emerging stablecoins have no chance.

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new battlefield

Exchanges are now the most widely used application scenarios for stablecoins, but from a broader perspective, stablecoins, as a special on-chain cryptocurrency, have wider application scenarios on public chains, including pledge custody , decentralized transactions, cross-border payments, legal currency deposit channels, etc., but they are all at a very early stage.

Taking cross-border payment or prediction market as an example, if users use mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ripple to carry out such activities, but due to the large daily price fluctuations of such cryptocurrencies, the user's due rights and interests will easily shrink. Therefore, users need currencies with less fluctuation in value within a certain period of time to avoid risks, and stable coins are the best medium.

This means that with the deepening development of the public chain ecology, stablecoins are likely to usher in a burst of development opportunities in the field of public chains. Due to objective reasons such as slow business progress on the chain, although USDT has gradually expanded from the OMNI layer built on the Bitcoin blockchain to Ethereum and TRON, its market share in the public chain field is still very low.

At the same time, a large number of public chains have begun to accelerate their deployment in the direction of stable coins. However, since the issuance of stablecoins requires complex processes such as obtaining compliance licenses and fund custody, the issuer needs to have strong financial comprehensive capabilities. It would take a lot of energy for the public chain project party to choose independent issuance, which is not a wise choice. Therefore, most public chains choose to cooperate with existing stablecoins such as USDC and PAX, which not only simplifies the issuance process, but also gives full play to the role of stablecoins in the public chain.

It can be seen that all major public chains are actively striving for compliant stablecoins to enter their ecosystems and improve their ecosystems. In the future, stablecoins may become the necessary infrastructure for every public chain, as evidenced by the vastness of the market.

However, due to the decentralized nature of the financial business and the public chain itself, it may be difficult for a certain stablecoin to have the leading position in the public chain industry like USDT in the exchange, but there is a high probability that three or five stablecoins will form the first The first echelon, while promoting the popularization of public chain business, has greatly changed the existing pattern of stable coins.

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Giants enter

In recent months, the most important news in the field of stable currency is the news that famous companies such as Facebook, JPMorgan Chase and Samsung will enter the stable currency. It seems that stable currency has become the focus of attention of many technology giants and financial giants at the same time.

As an important hub connecting the cryptocurrency world and the fiat currency world, stablecoins are the direction with the strongest potential compliance in the cryptocurrency field, and it is also one of the directions with the greatest potential for implementation. It is reasonable for these giants to take a fancy to stablecoins.

Taking Facebook as an example, its stable currency issuance will be mainly used in online payment, cross-border transfer, advertising and other scenarios. Considering that Facebook has as many as 2.7 billion users worldwide, this move will inevitably promote the popularity of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology among the aforementioned people. popularization and accelerate the development of the entire industry.

Due to the innate landing scenarios and giant endorsement of this kind of stable currency, it can form a huge subversion to the existing stable currency market, but there is still a lot of uncertainty in this subversion. If the stablecoins issued by Facebook and USDT, TUSD and other stablecoins are also exchanged for fiat currency, they will inevitably be swarmed by major exchanges and bring a series of regulatory issues, which Facebook obviously does not want to see Yes, there is a high probability that specific technical means will be adopted to limit it.

Therefore, the stablecoins of the giants will bring more vitality and variables to the stablecoin market, but in the short to medium term, it is difficult to have a major impact on the current mainstream stablecoins. It is more like a parallel market, which promotes in different ways. The scene of stable currency and even the cryptocurrency industry has landed.