CategoryBanking

Fractional Reserve Banking onchain

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Stablecoins are, in essence, the first large-scale experiment in narrow banking. Every USDC or USDT is (or supposed to be) fully backed by reserves – cash or short-term Treasuries – sitting safely off-chain. This architecture is what makes these tokens stable, but it also sterilizes capital: every dollar deposited creates no new credit, no new economic activity. In contrast, the...

Stablecoins 2.0

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Stablecoins, led by Tether (USDT) and USDC, now total $180 billion, with new entrants like yield-bearing stablecoins, PayPal's PYUSD, Agora and M0 trying to disrupt the market.

While USDT and USDC dominate, blockchain’s true potential could lead to disruptive changes in the future of money.

The rise of lifestyle banking

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Before smartphones, the corporeal world had a much more relevant role in building solutions to essentially any human problem. Physical constraints strongly influenced the ideation and implementation of these processes. This was obviously reflected also in the banking space.  Originally, the banking industry solved the problems of storing money, delivering payments and acquiring liquidity, in...

A neobank stack

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Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time building lending and banking stacks. What used to require vast resources only 10 years ago, is today a much simpler and more inexpensive job, thanks to the enormous number of financial infrastructure businesses born in the last decade. The goals of the following 2 posts are: to highlight which are the key functional components of these stacks, to...

Bank runs in the 21th century

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We live in very special times, from many points of view. Essentially any aspect of our life is being disrupted and this wave of unusuality is impacting banks as well: banks are seeing their deposits going up, they are getting a lot of money, but, for once, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. The usual way: bank runs Usually people put their money in banks confident that they are safely stored...