Chris Dixon: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. They had actually really soured on it. When I saw them, I would say, “Oh, crypto is . . .” Go watch them. I just watched them on the All-In podcast a few weeks ago. They acquired this company called Bridge. It’s a stablecoin company, and actually, in their annual letter they just put out, they called stablecoins the room temperature superconductor, which, of course, is like a holy grail kind of thing. They’re using it for — I don’t know — I don’t have their financial statements on the thing, but as they describe it, they’re using it for things like treasury management. I believe the example they gave was SpaceX moving money from one jurisdiction to another. A very popular use case is international invoicing. You’re an importer, and you have to send out 50 invoices to various countries. You can now do it in a fully digital way with very low fees and very quickly. The Stripe founders — one of the interesting things they said is, it’s not just the lower fees. Just to give you a sense on the fees — this is as of a year and a half ago, basically, because the infrastructure in crypto has gotten better. You now, basically, on things like Base, which is an L2, and Solana — have hit what we’ve thought of for a long time as a target, which is one second-one penny to transfer things. That’s where we are now technically. Your viewers — if they want to check me, they can go download the Coinbase Wallet and try it, and you can see it. One of the big benefits the Stripe founders talked about is the fact that you can now — because it’s fully digital end-to-end, like email — you can fully automate the whole thing. A big problem, for example, with invoicing is invoice fraud. People send you an invoice, and it’s a fake place to wire it to. Now, it’s fully digital. Stripe has, effectively, what’s like a reputation network. One computer sends a request to the other, and the other one checks it. It checks it against Stripe’s database. Is this a white-listed address? And it does the whole thing end-to-end, low fees, internationally. To your question, will there be people at the fringes who want to maximize yield? Sure, there’s always that kind of behavior. Probably, it’s the internet. The internet has edges. The question is, can we marginalize it? And will these legitimate companies like Stripe . . . What I’m hoping — Stablecoin bill passes. I think Visa will enter, MasterCard will enter, PayPal will enter. Fidelity has already said they’re going to enter. Bank of America said they’re going to enter. I think you’re going to have every bank probably issuing, I hope, a stablecoin the way you have them issuing credit cards. These all have users and customers. The banks will have a button that says, “Send a stablecoin.” What I’m hoping is that there’re enough legitimate actors around this who create a network effect that, to your point, yes, there will be that stuff, but it will be marginalized. In that world, should we infer that the Federal Reserve loses control of the money supply? Create a stablecoin. It’s backed by a T-bill. In a funny way, it’s like a private open-market operation. I’m fine with that. I’m not sure the Fed controls the money supply today. Does that become a macro issue?…

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