crypto

A reminder that closed, permissioned stablecoins issued by stores like Walmart and Amazon already exist

They are called gift cards

Award-winning Host of @Coinage covering crypto for a mainstream audience | Fmr. YahooFinance Anchor & Harvard Econ Grad | Co-Own Coinage with me 🫡

Except you can't refund a gift card.

Stablecoin implies they will be able to be swapped, potentially used in other apps.

GENIUS Act will mean that any at-scale company with a lot of payments—both retail and B2B—will explore how to nudge consumers (and force vendors) to use the payment method.

Under the radar, but Walmart has a neobank that is used by a lot of their millions of employees and increasingly customers to do in-store payments.

The challenge is if you don't already have a balance loaded into an app, you're still going to use a debit or credit card.

Why stablecoins will be more likley a sustaining innovation that benefits incumbents in most cases vs. a disruptive innovation benefitting startups.

I struggle to see why a retailer would want to do this.

They already have a great racket going with gift cards that people forget about

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I agree, though there's an important distinction to make. Address-based blocking and locking mechanisms operate differently from time-based or terms-and-conditions triggered dissolution, particularly in terms of their scope and implementation approach.

These actions definitely fall in the same general category of transaction controls, I just think they're more like cousins than siblings in terms of functionality. 

Centralization creates the vulnerability regardless of the specific method used, which is probably why the big corps want to own their own stable (and maybe even chain?). The changes can be address-based, expiration, T&C change, whatever, the companies want it because they keep the power to disable transactions. IMO there isn't an obvious reason to go from gift cards to stables, but maybe I don't get it.

Centralized stablecoin issuers can also turn off addresses / lock coins just the same (USDC and Tether do this all the time)

+they can expire gift cards including according to T&Cs (i.e. semi-arbitrarily)

Yeah I can’t instantly use my Walmart gift card at Target or trade it for Fartcoin on a whim