What Is A Stablecoin, The New Tech Turning Geopolitics Upside Down?

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 03: U.S. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent (L) and Howard Lutnick, U.S. ... More President Donald Trump's nominee for Commerce Secretary, (R) stand behind U.S. President Donald Trump as he speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on February 03, 2025 in Washington, DC. After signing a series of executive orders and proclamations, Trump spoke to reporters about a range of topics including recent negotiations with Mexico on tarriffs. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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Many readers might be familiar with Bitcoin. Yet a new entrant in the monetary order is stablecoins. They're the talk of the town in DC - and stablecoin players are making major geopolitical and economic moves.
What a stablecoin is
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency token issued by a company that pledges to exchange or redeem some asset in return for each token issued. The US dollar often backs stablecoins; for example, USDC (USD Coin issued by Circle) and USDT (Tether) are the largest stablecoins and they are backed by the US dollar.
In the example of a US-backed stablecoin, an issuer will pledge to give you one US dollar for each token redeemed with them. This pledge means that you have to have faith in the underlying company to hold enough reserves to make you whole - and that they don’t engage in fractional reserve, meaning that they issue more tokens than they hold in terms of dollars, with the hope that people will not come and make a "run on their reserve" - similar to a bank run.
Some stablecoins are Euro-denominated and denominated in other currencies, such as the EURC. When Meta proposed the Libra Project (which became Diem) - the original idea was to create a stablecoin backed by a basket of currencies. There are also different stablecoins - from reserve-backed like the ones described to algorithmic stablecoins to even commodity-backed stablecoins that offer redemptions in gold for a token.
Stablecoins offer a token that can be used to settle payments in the underlying currency - a very popular solution for those without access to banking in the currency (ex, US dollar banking) or for those looking to avoid banking costs and the cost of transactions and wire transfers for cross-border remittances, micropayments and to a certain degree, merchant payments.