a peso is a stablecoin too

tuesday i taped with a founder who started one of the first ways to buy bitcoin in argentina. back in 2013, when most people he met hadn't heard the word.

he found bitcoin by necessity. he was in san francisco paying developers in argentina, so he bought bitcoin in the us and sold it on forums back home. there was no wallet built for his country, so he built one.

the company name means gravel. as he put it on air, "most of the roads in patagonia are made of" gravel. so the idea was to make roads... gravel roads into a new kind of money.

i felt that one. i was building unocoin in india through a lot of the same years. same blank stares. same question... what is it? same moment when you realize nobody's coming to build the road for you.

around 2021 his team made a call a lot of founders never make. they stopped fighting the top fintechs for retail customers and became the layer the big platforms plug into. let the apps fight for downloads. be the road under all of them.

then he laid out where he thinks this goes, and it reframed stablecoins for me.

his read is that tokenization follows liquidity. the most liquid thing goes on chain first. dollars went first, and that part's done. equities and bonds come next. local currencies after that.

a local currency stablecoin is the same idea as a dollar stablecoin, pegged to a national currency like the peso or the real instead of the dollar. right now the local ones are a small share of the stablecoin market in the region. most of the volume is still dollars.

so why would anyone want a real on chain? his example was the on-ramp.

put 1,000 reals in through the ramps people use now and you might see around 950 on chain after fees. a local stablecoin can make it 1,000 in, 1,000 on chain.

that gap is the toll on the gravel road. people pay it every time money moves between their bank and the chain. pave the road and the toll shrinks.

fifty reals on a thousand doesn't sound like much once. but people who earn in local currency move money in and out over and over. the toll adds up every time they do.

it's like the currency booth at the airport. you don't notice the spread until you do the math, and then you can't stop seeing it.

a founder who's lived through that spread builds differently. you stop thinking about the app on top and start thinking about what every app underneath has to pay.

i'll be clear about my own lens. bitcoin is the base layer of sound money, and a peso token doesn't change that. but i care about rails, because rails are how normal people get from their bank account to anything on chain, bitcoin included. if it costs five percent just to show up, a lot of people never show up.

and the bigger lesson for founders has nothing to do with stablecoins. it's the 2021 decision. when the giants are fighting over the same customer, the opening is often underneath them. become the thing everyone plugs into instead of the app competing for downloads.

long term i think the machine economy makes this sharper. software and robots moving value around all day will route around any toll they can. the cheapest road tends to win.

if you want the bigger picture of why bitcoin sits under all of it, the bitcoin book is here.

so in your market, who's fighting over the customer... and who's building the road they all drive on?