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Why 'stablecoins' won't age well

The term stablecoin was born in the early days of crypto when prices were highly volatile, making it difficult to use the technology for everyday financial activities. To solve this problem, assets were designed to hold steady value, and the name stablecoin was a straightforward description of the solution. However, the technology has since evolved and outgrown the label. Stability is now a prerequisite, and the focus has shifted to what can be built with these assets. Stablecoins have become foundational infrastructure for a new global financial system, enabling instant cross-border transactions, immediate settlement, and direct ownership without intermediaries. They can also be embedded into applications in ways traditional money cannot, allowing for new use cases and innovations. The question is no longer about whether stablecoins will hold their value, but what else can be built with them. The name stablecoin is now outdated, as it still points to the original problem it was designed to solve, rather than the platform it has become. The term frames the category as a patch rather than a new primitive, anchoring us to an earlier mental model. Despite this, the name is likely to stick, just like other outdated terms such as horsepower, which was coined to describe the power of steam engines in terms of the number of horses they could replace. As stablecoins continue to scale and become more ubiquitous, the name will matter less and less. What will matter is that money behaves like the rest of the internet: fast, programmable, and ubiquitous. The technology will likely disappear into the background, becoming just how money works, and the name stablecoin will sound like a leftover metaphor from a bygone era. The shift enabled by stablecoins is from money being managed by institutions to money behaving like software. This change has the potential to have a significant impact, with stablecoins likely to have a much greater impact than crypto has had so far. As the technology continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how the name and perception of stablecoins change over time.