The chief executive of USDC issuer Circle is revealing his “extraordinary” long-term outlook on the digital assets industry.
In a new interview with investor Anthony Pompliano, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire says that over the years, stablecoins will slowly encroach on the dominance of electronic money held by banks.
Allaire compares stablecoins to online videos and banks to traditional cable broadcast, noting that it took decades for online videos to significantly intrude on the viewing hours of the latter.
“You have currently a total addressable market of about $100 trillion of legal electronic money. Most of that is bank-intermediated electronic money and so I do believe that this full reserve stablecoin money that has internet-scale utility [and] programmability will take a larger and larger share of that over time…
If in 10 years, 5% of the global market of electronic money was stablecoin money, that would be extraordinary and seems very achievable.”
According to Allaire, stablecoins will help lower the marginal cost of moving funds to essentially zero, much like how internet utilities made the cost of storing and moving information to zero in the past.
“I believe the same principle [that applies to storing and moving information] is going to apply here with blockchain networks and stablecoins.
The marginal cost of storing and moving values [is] approaching zero and when that happens, the velocity of money is going to increase orders of magnitude and so the demand for that will grow far larger than the demand that we’ve had in the legacy system.
I don’t know exactly what that means but I know it means that the total addressable market of money will actually be a lot bigger because we’ve restructured the actual economics of how this works.”