The Daily Peg
Stablecoins position themselves as productive uses of money in contrast to 'idle' bank deposits.
Editorial hello
You know crypto and fintech have finally become the very thing they once claimed to disrupt when sitting through a Circle earnings call feels every bit as arduous and jargon-laden as a conventional bank earnings call.
I persevered regardless. Despite the effort, there were really only two notable takeaways. The first was a quiet early reference to the “strong growth” Circle is seeing in other digital assets, most notably EURC — the world’s largest euro stablecoin — which doubled year over year to end the period at €358 million.
The second concerned executives’ repeated insistence that USDC rewards will be driven by “utility” use cases — language that increasingly appears less like marketing and more like regulatory positioning.
This framing, I would say, is clearly designed to align with the final iteration — specifically the so-called “404 compromise” — of the upcoming Clarity Act, which permits stablecoin rewards provided they are not “economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit.”
