Not every firm has the brand power to launch a stablecoin: Core VC

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

Core VC’s David Roos is still pretty excited about all of the attention stablecoins are getting.

And he’s clearly not alone, based on Bitwise data.

Loading Tweet..

“You’re seeing that this is an innovation that really has legs,” Roos added. Conduit, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, is one of Core’s portfolio companies.

I asked him if he thought that everyone and their mother would launch stablecoins post-GENIUS, because we’ve already heard from a slew of interested firms, including Interactive Brokers.

“It’s not going to be like thousands of stablecoins out there, but I do think there will be — call it a dozen — and it’ll be led by massive organizations that have the power to do so,” he said. Not every company has the brand power to launch its own stablecoin, he added.

He doesn’t think we’ll see something like Zelle but for stablecoins, “in terms of banks just kind of taking over the one use case.”

“I think we’ve seen, between Walmart and Amazon, you know, some Fortune 500’s that are looking at the ability to create this kind of closed-loop financial payment system in a way they weren’t able to do previously, and it gives them a lot of benefits to bypass the system and save a lot of dollars that they’re spending in interchange,” he continued.

This, Roos noted, makes a great case for digital wallets as well, which makes projects building wallets compelling.

“I think there still is a lack of consumer-friendly user interfaces in the crypto world…There is consumer education that’s typically needed in order to use digital wallets, and so I’m still in search of digital wallet unit interfaces that have usability and have friendly interfaces for the non-crypto-native users, because at the end of the day, the mass market will struggle to use what is currently the infrastructure that we built out today,” he said.

But he’s also interested in digital identity because, “as more and more companies [benefit from] your data, you want to be able to control what is in your wallet, and there needs to be more security around the identity of your wallet. And so I think there will be a platform that exists and a protocol that exists that creates this consumer-centric identity,” Roos added.

And there’s your food for thought today.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters: