Am I the only one who thinks "stablecoin" is an incredibly dumb concept? Oh cool, it should be at 1:1 value with USD, but instead of 1 USD, I have 1 cryptodollar that is accepted almost nowhere...
Am I the only one who thinks "stablecoin" is an incredibly dumb concept? Oh cool, it should be at 1:1 value with USD, but instead of 1 USD, I have 1 cryptodollar that is accepted almost nowhere and still holds risk, because even if it's "decentralized" it also relies on some central entity. But that entity certainly isn't a bank that insures your money.
I suppose the idea is that the currency will become accepted elsewhere. And that this will somehow become the defacto payment method for... AI companies paying to scrape content they already rip for free?
Cloudflare does a lot of cool stuff, but I would be surprised if even they could make a cryptocurrency that is simultaneously successful and also not a grift.
To steelman the concept the point of a stablecoin, basically you want to take US dollars, but it's actually surprisingly hard to take USD in many cases. There are two main areas where it's hard....
To steelman the concept the point of a stablecoin, basically you want to take US dollars, but it's actually surprisingly hard to take USD in many cases.
There are two main areas where it's hard. One is for, let's say, businesses on the margins. Of course, there's the usual suspects (drugs, although that also includes marijuana, which no bank will allow you to run a business with since it's still federally illegal in the US), but also things like - racey video games (the somewhat infamous "censorship" from payment processors for steam etc), payments to countries that the US doesn't like, and so forth.
Another is more for B2B transactions. It can be surprisingly hard to move large amounts of dollars around. Within the US, ACH is free, but extremely cumbersome (to the point where you usually need to pay another company to deal with it), and has a very long settlement period (3 days).
It's even worse cross-border. Now it's just a free for all. People think SWIFT is a magic bullet, but it's not. It's merely a protocol for banks to talk to each other. In practice, moving large amounts of money between countries is extremely costly and often has even longer settlement periods.
One thing I sometimes find from people who work in stablecoins is that they got there by working at a company that had to move lots of money around often and found current payment rails to be...
One thing I sometimes find from people who work in stablecoins is that they got there by working at a company that had to move lots of money around often and found current payment rails to be operational bottlenecks
An anecdotal example was someone from Uber, who said they started learning how to write onchain programs to move stablecoins around because of how expensive it was to pay drivers globally (for clarity not saying that Uber is doing this, he left Uber in a sort of "there must be a better way to get money to people" mindset after seeing how much they spend on the process and started something else that space.)
Yep. This has been the selling point of crypto, in my eyes, since the start. An accidentally agreed upon standard to do international and large sum banking. It’s fun because the actual genesis of...
Yep. This has been the selling point of crypto, in my eyes, since the start. An accidentally agreed upon standard to do international and large sum banking.
It’s fun because the actual genesis of the stable coin was more “holy fuck if I ever cash this out I get ripped apart by the government so can I just keep it as crypto while I figure out my next buy?”
It may STILL be a mess, but people are so used to multi trillion dollar players abstracting that mess away from them they don’t understand just how much more of a mess it is RIGHT NOW.
There’s accounts out there that float either way in an hour more than any of us will make in our lives.
My issue here is that these "problems" with USD are not inherent to USD, they exist purely because we haven't built the infrastructure to solve them. We could build that infrastructure, and it...
My issue here is that these "problems" with USD are not inherent to USD, they exist purely because we haven't built the infrastructure to solve them. We could build that infrastructure, and it would require many orders of magnitude less compute and energy resources than any shitcoins.
In the end, "we" has to be the government, for USD. Anything involving money movement is highly regulated, for better or for worse. You can't just randomly build out USD infrastructure. "We", as...
In the end, "we" has to be the government, for USD. Anything involving money movement is highly regulated, for better or for worse. You can't just randomly build out USD infrastructure. "We", as in private citizens, explicitly cannot build out that infrastructure.
And it won't help with crossborder, which is a major impetus for the growth of stablecoin-related money settlement.
Half the problems are because of the government anyhow. No US government run money settlement system will ever support weed businesses, or payouts to Cubans.
I'd also add that these are mostly apple-to-oranges. At least so far, the major corporate backed stablecoins really exist for B2B transactions, not B2C like digital payments in India and Brazil.
many orders of magnitude less compute and energy resources than any shitcoins.
The cloudflare page doesn't say, but if it works anything like how the Stripe sponsored stablecoin is, they're all proof of stake, which has other issues, but the energy use is negligible.
I have been wondering if they even need it to be "proper" crypto. Conceptually if its so centralized anyway why not just use a database? I wonder if its a regulatory thing. Like if they use a...
I have been wondering if they even need it to be "proper" crypto. Conceptually if its so centralized anyway why not just use a database?
I wonder if its a regulatory thing. Like if they use a normal database it puts them too close to being a regular payment processor and ending up regulated like one?
No, there isn't any inherent reason it has to be a cryptocurrency. The US law regulating (and therefore legalizing) stablecoins only defines it as a digital asset one can exchange at a fixed rate....
No, there isn't any inherent reason it has to be a cryptocurrency. The US law regulating (and therefore legalizing) stablecoins only defines it as a digital asset one can exchange at a fixed rate.
The main benefit, especially for B2B, is that the ledger is public and immutable. That makes it less risky to move large sums of money on it. That's not to say there can't be bugs, but at least everyone can see the on-chain behavior, so you don't need to request an RCA from a company to see what went wrong.
IIRC the Stripe one has a fixed number of validators, so basically it turns the problem from "can you trust X company" to a Byzantine general problem of "can you trust Y out of these X companies to not steal your money".
I don't see this as a currency, it's a decentralized payment service. They are using a cryptocurrency as a vehicle, but it's really meant as a digital form of cash. If it breaks ads as a source of...
I don't see this as a currency, it's a decentralized payment service. They are using a cryptocurrency as a vehicle, but it's really meant as a digital form of cash. If it breaks ads as a source of revenue then power to them. I hate subscriptions so I'd rather have a digital wallet in my browser and set spending limits. E.g. $0.01 for a page is okay, just pay it, but prompt me if it's more the $0.05.
Think of it sort of like a bank: people put money in and get a balance, which is just an electronic record. The stablecoin issuer invests the money, much like a bank would, except in much more...
Think of it sort of like a bank: people put money in and get a balance, which is just an electronic record. The stablecoin issuer invests the money, much like a bank would, except in much more conservative investments. Since they earn interest and don’t pay interest, this can be very profitable. (As long as interest rates aren’t too low.)
So it’s no surprise why companies might want to get into this business. They’re doing it now because of a new law making stablecoins more unambiguously legal that was passed in July. But why do people put money in?
One reason might be that you usually can’t open a US bank account without traveling to the US, so people will look for substitutes, particularly in countries where the local banks are iffy.
Stripe announced a stablecoin. They handle payments and currency conversions for businesses that have international customers, so they have a built in customer base. Similarly for Paypal. Cloudflare seems more iffy, but it has a lot of customers worldwide, too. If they can actually figure out micropayments for websites, that could be big. And sure, maybe some of those payments might be made by bots, but they don’t have to be.
The cryptocurrency aspect seems almost incidental to this business model.
I've also experienced somewhat of the reverse of this scenario. I have US bank accounts / credit cards. My CC company blocked me when I traveled to Singapore last year. While waiting for the fraud...
One reason might be that you usually can’t open a US bank account without traveling to the US, so people will look for substitutes, particularly in countries where the local banks are iffy.
I've also experienced somewhat of the reverse of this scenario. I have US bank accounts / credit cards. My CC company blocked me when I traveled to Singapore last year. While waiting for the fraud dept. to unblock my account, I sent USDC to Grab SG (like Uber but for Singapore). Was then able to pay for rides and food and stuff.
Handling foreign transactions seems to vary by issuer (and maybe even by card). I've got one where both the bank and the card are really focused on US-only usage which triggers fraud detection...
Handling foreign transactions seems to vary by issuer (and maybe even by card). I've got one where both the bank and the card are really focused on US-only usage which triggers fraud detection when used abroad by default. I can submit a form ahead of time saying "I'll be traveling to X between Y and Z" and then I'll get smooth usage. I've got another card from a US-based bank geared for travel – no ftx fees, travel related points, etc. – and that one typically just works anywhere by default for normal payments.
Most payment rails start off as being used nowhere, or only in highly localized jurisdictions. It took Burger King 50 years to accept credit cards after their initial launch. It took Shopify 8...
Most payment rails start off as being used nowhere, or only in highly localized jurisdictions.
It took Burger King 50 years to accept credit cards after their initial launch.
It took Shopify 8 years to accept USDC after it's initial launch.
I'm not sure if NET dollars will go anywhere, Cloudflare seems a bit odd ball to me as a stablecoin issuer (I'm not even sure if they are operating in line with genius act, pretty sure they're breaking the prohibition of publicly traded non-financial companies launching stablecoins, so probably illegal), but I do think getting usage of a payment rail is very tough unless you're already entrenched... and cloudflare happens to be very entrenched with connecting boxes over the internet.
The true value of cryptocurrency has always been that it has no masters.* *This is a loaded statement that is not entirely true, bear with me. There's really two big parties that enjoy crypto, one...
The true value of cryptocurrency has always been that it has no masters.*
*This is a loaded statement that is not entirely true, bear with me.
There's really two big parties that enjoy crypto, one side uses it as thing to speculate on. It wants to see the value of 1 crypto coin go up, when valued in real (issued by a central bank) money. They don't really care about the original mission of bitcoin, but what they profit off of is that the supply is fixed and cannot be changed, and demand is soaring, for whatever reason. There is no central bank that can add to the supply.
The other party are the people that actually use crypto for paying. This is currently relegated to illegal or near illegal payments. But, as anyone handling actual money will tell you, you don't want the value of it to fluctuate wildly. What we have seen in history is usually a massive devaluation of a currency (=inflation, see the end of the Weimar republic and the famous Zimbabwe dollar), mostly because it's much easier to do than the opposite, but that's what's happening to crypto, see paragraph above. The problem is, that that makes crypto pretty shit as an actual currency which you use in exchange for goods and services.
Right now when I see people talking about cryptocurrency, I don't see them talking about it's potential as a currency, just as a highly volatile asset that you speculate with. Stablecoins is crypto that tries to appeal to people who want to use it as a currency and not as an asset, by leveraging some backing asset. It's kinda replicating the gold standard of old that central banks once used to back their own made up currency. This ideally stabilizes the value, while still benefiting from the easy international money transfer that cryptocurrency offers.
Of course, the question is, where does Cloudflare profit from this? They've done these seemingly altruistic things in the past when they benefit from the ecosystem around it. For example, they are still the cheapest domain store that exists because they don't charge for that service, they just charge you the fee from the registrar. But that can change on a whim. I suspect that they'll do this at cost for now.
Running a stablecoin is inherently profitable. It's essentially being a bank. People give you US dollars, you buy interest-bearing safe assets like US treasury bonds, and you get to reap all of...
Of course, the question is, where does Cloudflare profit from this?
Running a stablecoin is inherently profitable. It's essentially being a bank. People give you US dollars, you buy interest-bearing safe assets like US treasury bonds, and you get to reap all of the interest.
A stable coin coming out of Cloudflare makes a lot of sense to me conceptually, but I feel like the way they've positioned it is very dumb. Cloudflare is quite a trusted entity. Way more than the...
A stable coin coming out of Cloudflare makes a lot of sense to me conceptually, but I feel like the way they've positioned it is very dumb.
Cloudflare is quite a trusted entity. Way more than the likes of Tether (as an aside, in my opinion it is unlikely Tether is fully backed and is a ponzi scheme that is just still waiting to explode). If they had a privacy-focused coin positioned for things like international payments, accountless pay-as-you-view news articles, content creator tipping, and the various other interactions mentioned elsewhere in this thread I could see the appeal. But positioning it for AI comes with a kind of off putting ick that feels like a poor vision. AI users would probably be fine with regular crypto and without Cloudflare being involved anyway.
I think that was my view on Tether until FTX happened. My view on Tether is they had a hole in the early days, either due to lack of sophistication or malfeasance. By 2020 it was ironed out but...
I think that was my view on Tether until FTX happened.
My view on Tether is they had a hole in the early days, either due to lack of sophistication or malfeasance. By 2020 it was ironed out but they probably still held commercial paper of global banks. By 2021 they likely fully traded out of that and into t-bills (among there other assets, but HQLA reserves to meet 1:1 redemptions). But post-FTX they met redemptions that would end every bank (they'd have been wiped out at that time if there was a real lack of backing there).
San Francisco, CA – September 25, 2025 – Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced plans to introduce NET Dollar, a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that will enable instant, secure transactions for the agentic web. NET Dollar will help power a new business model for the Internet that rewards originality, sustains creativity, and enables innovation in an AI-driven world.
Hah. If it were written by anyone else I might think it’s satire. It seems natural that crypto and AI would converge, given their popularity with grifters.
rewards originality, sustains creativity, and enables innovation in an AI-driven world.
Hah. If it were written by anyone else I might think it’s satire.
It seems natural that crypto and AI would converge, given their popularity with grifters.
Hmm. Maybe someone should create a service to help AI create bank accounts. Like hire real people to make the bank accounts for the AIs. Then once that gets big enough, where it's too costly to...
Hmm. Maybe someone should create a service to help AI create bank accounts. Like hire real people to make the bank accounts for the AIs.
Then once that gets big enough, where it's too costly to hire that many people, make AIs that can make bank accounts for the AIs.
I wonder, however, who will open the new AIs' bank accounts? I bet people could do it. Hmm...
I don’t see why this would prevent AI being used for trade? It doesn’t prevent bot trading. Bots trade automatically all day on Wall Street. Also, when you buy something at Amazon? There’s no...
I don’t see why this would prevent AI being used for trade? It doesn’t prevent bot trading. Bots trade automatically all day on Wall Street.
Also, when you buy something at Amazon? There’s no human handling the other side of the trade.
And there are vending machines.
But there are other, less legitimate transactions that could be automated, I suppose.
I have a technical question here, how were these animations accomplished? I really love the look of the website and the way it animates through letters.
I have a technical question here, how were these animations accomplished? I really love the look of the website and the way it animates through letters.
Am I the only one who thinks "stablecoin" is an incredibly dumb concept? Oh cool, it should be at 1:1 value with USD, but instead of 1 USD, I have 1 cryptodollar that is accepted almost nowhere and still holds risk, because even if it's "decentralized" it also relies on some central entity. But that entity certainly isn't a bank that insures your money.
I suppose the idea is that the currency will become accepted elsewhere. And that this will somehow become the defacto payment method for... AI companies paying to scrape content they already rip for free?
Cloudflare does a lot of cool stuff, but I would be surprised if even they could make a cryptocurrency that is simultaneously successful and also not a grift.
To steelman the concept the point of a stablecoin, basically you want to take US dollars, but it's actually surprisingly hard to take USD in many cases.
There are two main areas where it's hard. One is for, let's say, businesses on the margins. Of course, there's the usual suspects (drugs, although that also includes marijuana, which no bank will allow you to run a business with since it's still federally illegal in the US), but also things like - racey video games (the somewhat infamous "censorship" from payment processors for steam etc), payments to countries that the US doesn't like, and so forth.
Another is more for B2B transactions. It can be surprisingly hard to move large amounts of dollars around. Within the US, ACH is free, but extremely cumbersome (to the point where you usually need to pay another company to deal with it), and has a very long settlement period (3 days).
It's even worse cross-border. Now it's just a free for all. People think SWIFT is a magic bullet, but it's not. It's merely a protocol for banks to talk to each other. In practice, moving large amounts of money between countries is extremely costly and often has even longer settlement periods.
One thing I sometimes find from people who work in stablecoins is that they got there by working at a company that had to move lots of money around often and found current payment rails to be operational bottlenecks
An anecdotal example was someone from Uber, who said they started learning how to write onchain programs to move stablecoins around because of how expensive it was to pay drivers globally (for clarity not saying that Uber is doing this, he left Uber in a sort of "there must be a better way to get money to people" mindset after seeing how much they spend on the process and started something else that space.)
Yep. This has been the selling point of crypto, in my eyes, since the start. An accidentally agreed upon standard to do international and large sum banking.
It’s fun because the actual genesis of the stable coin was more “holy fuck if I ever cash this out I get ripped apart by the government so can I just keep it as crypto while I figure out my next buy?”
It may STILL be a mess, but people are so used to multi trillion dollar players abstracting that mess away from them they don’t understand just how much more of a mess it is RIGHT NOW.
There’s accounts out there that float either way in an hour more than any of us will make in our lives.
My issue here is that these "problems" with USD are not inherent to USD, they exist purely because we haven't built the infrastructure to solve them. We could build that infrastructure, and it would require many orders of magnitude less compute and energy resources than any shitcoins.
Countries like Brazil and India have built out infrastructure that solves many of these problems but it's a tough sell in America because credit card companies and cryptobros can't make money off it
In the end, "we" has to be the government, for USD. Anything involving money movement is highly regulated, for better or for worse. You can't just randomly build out USD infrastructure. "We", as in private citizens, explicitly cannot build out that infrastructure.
And it won't help with crossborder, which is a major impetus for the growth of stablecoin-related money settlement.
Half the problems are because of the government anyhow. No US government run money settlement system will ever support weed businesses, or payouts to Cubans.
I'd also add that these are mostly apple-to-oranges. At least so far, the major corporate backed stablecoins really exist for B2B transactions, not B2C like digital payments in India and Brazil.
The cloudflare page doesn't say, but if it works anything like how the Stripe sponsored stablecoin is, they're all proof of stake, which has other issues, but the energy use is negligible.
I have been wondering if they even need it to be "proper" crypto. Conceptually if its so centralized anyway why not just use a database?
I wonder if its a regulatory thing. Like if they use a normal database it puts them too close to being a regular payment processor and ending up regulated like one?
No, there isn't any inherent reason it has to be a cryptocurrency. The US law regulating (and therefore legalizing) stablecoins only defines it as a digital asset one can exchange at a fixed rate.
The main benefit, especially for B2B, is that the ledger is public and immutable. That makes it less risky to move large sums of money on it. That's not to say there can't be bugs, but at least everyone can see the on-chain behavior, so you don't need to request an RCA from a company to see what went wrong.
IIRC the Stripe one has a fixed number of validators, so basically it turns the problem from "can you trust X company" to a Byzantine general problem of "can you trust Y out of these X companies to not steal your money".
I don't see this as a currency, it's a decentralized payment service. They are using a cryptocurrency as a vehicle, but it's really meant as a digital form of cash. If it breaks ads as a source of revenue then power to them. I hate subscriptions so I'd rather have a digital wallet in my browser and set spending limits. E.g. $0.01 for a page is okay, just pay it, but prompt me if it's more the $0.05.
Think of it sort of like a bank: people put money in and get a balance, which is just an electronic record. The stablecoin issuer invests the money, much like a bank would, except in much more conservative investments. Since they earn interest and don’t pay interest, this can be very profitable. (As long as interest rates aren’t too low.)
So it’s no surprise why companies might want to get into this business. They’re doing it now because of a new law making stablecoins more unambiguously legal that was passed in July. But why do people put money in?
One reason might be that you usually can’t open a US bank account without traveling to the US, so people will look for substitutes, particularly in countries where the local banks are iffy.
Stripe announced a stablecoin. They handle payments and currency conversions for businesses that have international customers, so they have a built in customer base. Similarly for Paypal. Cloudflare seems more iffy, but it has a lot of customers worldwide, too. If they can actually figure out micropayments for websites, that could be big. And sure, maybe some of those payments might be made by bots, but they don’t have to be.
The cryptocurrency aspect seems almost incidental to this business model.
I've also experienced somewhat of the reverse of this scenario. I have US bank accounts / credit cards. My CC company blocked me when I traveled to Singapore last year. While waiting for the fraud dept. to unblock my account, I sent USDC to Grab SG (like Uber but for Singapore). Was then able to pay for rides and food and stuff.
Handling foreign transactions seems to vary by issuer (and maybe even by card). I've got one where both the bank and the card are really focused on US-only usage which triggers fraud detection when used abroad by default. I can submit a form ahead of time saying "I'll be traveling to X between Y and Z" and then I'll get smooth usage. I've got another card from a US-based bank geared for travel – no ftx fees, travel related points, etc. – and that one typically just works anywhere by default for normal payments.
Most payment rails start off as being used nowhere, or only in highly localized jurisdictions.
It took Burger King 50 years to accept credit cards after their initial launch.
It took Shopify 8 years to accept USDC after it's initial launch.
I'm not sure if NET dollars will go anywhere, Cloudflare seems a bit odd ball to me as a stablecoin issuer (I'm not even sure if they are operating in line with genius act, pretty sure they're breaking the prohibition of publicly traded non-financial companies launching stablecoins, so probably illegal), but I do think getting usage of a payment rail is very tough unless you're already entrenched... and cloudflare happens to be very entrenched with connecting boxes over the internet.
The true value of cryptocurrency has always been that it has no masters.*
*This is a loaded statement that is not entirely true, bear with me.
There's really two big parties that enjoy crypto, one side uses it as thing to speculate on. It wants to see the value of 1 crypto coin go up, when valued in real (issued by a central bank) money. They don't really care about the original mission of bitcoin, but what they profit off of is that the supply is fixed and cannot be changed, and demand is soaring, for whatever reason. There is no central bank that can add to the supply.
The other party are the people that actually use crypto for paying. This is currently relegated to illegal or near illegal payments. But, as anyone handling actual money will tell you, you don't want the value of it to fluctuate wildly. What we have seen in history is usually a massive devaluation of a currency (=inflation, see the end of the Weimar republic and the famous Zimbabwe dollar), mostly because it's much easier to do than the opposite, but that's what's happening to crypto, see paragraph above. The problem is, that that makes crypto pretty shit as an actual currency which you use in exchange for goods and services.
Right now when I see people talking about cryptocurrency, I don't see them talking about it's potential as a currency, just as a highly volatile asset that you speculate with. Stablecoins is crypto that tries to appeal to people who want to use it as a currency and not as an asset, by leveraging some backing asset. It's kinda replicating the gold standard of old that central banks once used to back their own made up currency. This ideally stabilizes the value, while still benefiting from the easy international money transfer that cryptocurrency offers.
Of course, the question is, where does Cloudflare profit from this? They've done these seemingly altruistic things in the past when they benefit from the ecosystem around it. For example, they are still the cheapest domain store that exists because they don't charge for that service, they just charge you the fee from the registrar. But that can change on a whim. I suspect that they'll do this at cost for now.
Running a stablecoin is inherently profitable. It's essentially being a bank. People give you US dollars, you buy interest-bearing safe assets like US treasury bonds, and you get to reap all of the interest.
A stable coin coming out of Cloudflare makes a lot of sense to me conceptually, but I feel like the way they've positioned it is very dumb.
Cloudflare is quite a trusted entity. Way more than the likes of Tether (as an aside, in my opinion it is unlikely Tether is fully backed and is a ponzi scheme that is just still waiting to explode). If they had a privacy-focused coin positioned for things like international payments, accountless pay-as-you-view news articles, content creator tipping, and the various other interactions mentioned elsewhere in this thread I could see the appeal. But positioning it for AI comes with a kind of off putting ick that feels like a poor vision. AI users would probably be fine with regular crypto and without Cloudflare being involved anyway.
I think that was my view on Tether until FTX happened.
My view on Tether is they had a hole in the early days, either due to lack of sophistication or malfeasance. By 2020 it was ironed out but they probably still held commercial paper of global banks. By 2021 they likely fully traded out of that and into t-bills (among there other assets, but HQLA reserves to meet 1:1 redemptions). But post-FTX they met redemptions that would end every bank (they'd have been wiped out at that time if there was a real lack of backing there).
Press release: https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-introduces-net-dollar-to-support-a-new-business-model-for-the-ai-driven-internet/
Hah. If it were written by anyone else I might think it’s satire.
It seems natural that crypto and AI would converge, given their popularity with grifters.
And AI bots have trouble opening bank accounts
Hmm. Maybe someone should create a service to help AI create bank accounts. Like hire real people to make the bank accounts for the AIs.
Then once that gets big enough, where it's too costly to hire that many people, make AIs that can make bank accounts for the AIs.
I wonder, however, who will open the new AIs' bank accounts? I bet people could do it. Hmm...
BRB gonna run this idea through ChatGPT.
I don’t see why this would prevent AI being used for trade? It doesn’t prevent bot trading. Bots trade automatically all day on Wall Street.
Also, when you buy something at Amazon? There’s no human handling the other side of the trade.
And there are vending machines.
But there are other, less legitimate transactions that could be automated, I suppose.
I have a technical question here, how were these animations accomplished? I really love the look of the website and the way it animates through letters.