Actually there is a lot of cost, in terms of bank reputation, loan underwriting, and finding consumers and businesses to lend to. There is an entire loan servicing department etc.
Banks are allowed to keep fractional reserves and lend out money they create out of thin air.
Stablecoins are not. (Hi, Terra Luna!) Stablecoin issuers like DAI even overcollateralized. That money is sitting there doing nothing. Enter… banks.
USDT rebuffed the EU’s push to get them to deposit into European banks. They prefer US treasuries (and the current admin is lucky they’re doing it because the treasuries are taking a dive… and some of them are even looking into forcing partners to buy US treasuries and issue stablecoins).
The GENIUS act requires stablecoin issuers essentially to keep 100% of the money in deposits and to work with US banks, and prop up the US treasuries and dollar.
You see, originally, Tether (issuers of USDT, the original stablecoin) kept a lot of their collateral in Bitcoin, which was essentially creating an asset bubble / ponzi scheme where newly printed USDT propped up BTC and vice versa. But since the US government started running multi-trillion-dollar deficits every year, it has also become a ponzi scheme, just a sovereign-debt-based ponzi scheme.
That’s the real play here, for a country that’s $35 trillion in debt and needs to keep demand for its treasuries going… because printing money as UBI — to trickle up, get taxed and service the debt properly — just aint in its overton window. The link below goes over exactly how a UBI could solve multiple problems at once over a few decades (help cushion the demand shocks for human labor, help make taxes on pollution and fossil fuels popular, and help the government actually pay off its debt)… but since USA probably isn’t going to do this on a federal level, it might make sense to go bottom-up, town by town:
Actually there is a lot of cost, in terms of bank reputation, loan underwriting, and finding consumers and businesses to lend to. There is an entire loan servicing department etc.
Banks are allowed to keep fractional reserves and lend out money they create out of thin air.
Stablecoins are not. (Hi, Terra Luna!) Stablecoin issuers like DAI even overcollateralized. That money is sitting there doing nothing. Enter… banks.
USDT rebuffed the EU’s push to get them to deposit into European banks. They prefer US treasuries (and the current admin is lucky they’re doing it because the treasuries are taking a dive… and some of them are even looking into forcing partners to buy US treasuries and issue stablecoins).
The GENIUS act requires stablecoin issuers essentially to keep 100% of the money in deposits and to work with US banks, and prop up the US treasuries and dollar.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2025/05/06/why-s...
You see, originally, Tether (issuers of USDT, the original stablecoin) kept a lot of their collateral in Bitcoin, which was essentially creating an asset bubble / ponzi scheme where newly printed USDT propped up BTC and vice versa. But since the US government started running multi-trillion-dollar deficits every year, it has also become a ponzi scheme, just a sovereign-debt-based ponzi scheme.
That’s the real play here, for a country that’s $35 trillion in debt and needs to keep demand for its treasuries going… because printing money as UBI — to trickle up, get taxed and service the debt properly — just aint in its overton window. The link below goes over exactly how a UBI could solve multiple problems at once over a few decades (help cushion the demand shocks for human labor, help make taxes on pollution and fossil fuels popular, and help the government actually pay off its debt)… but since USA probably isn’t going to do this on a federal level, it might make sense to go bottom-up, town by town:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/ubi-is-not-socialism-but-i...