[pavlov]

What’s the benefit? A stablecoin is like an account at a weird unregulated bank from where you have to move the money to a real bank to use it.

How does using one of these products let me access the money faster than a wire between the sender’s USD account and mine?

[selestify]

Wire transfers take multiple business days, at least in the US, at least for me every single time I do one. Individual banks may also put restrictions on your domestic wire transfers. Maybe it's different for you since you're a business, but as an individual, there's a lot of friction in sending money to my friends.

> unregulated

Depending on your perspective, this is either a feature or a bug. In my opinion, a big feature.

> you have to move the money to a real bank to use it

Well yes, that's one of the main hurdles right now caused mainly by lack of adoption. It's not a fundamental problem with the tech; in fact, it's the very kind of problem that would be solved by it going mainstream.

> How does using one of these products let me access the money faster than a wire between the sender’s USD account and mine?

This one is easy: 6 Bitcoin confirmations takes about an hour, and only a few minutes for Ethereum. Much, much faster than wire transfers.

[pavlov]

To be clear, this is primarily a US problem.

I live in New York now, but previously I lived in Europe and UK. Bank transfers there are instant. If you want to send 20k EUR from Finland to Spain, it can be done immediately, 24/7, with minimal fees. Same in UK for GBP transactions.

So it’s perfectly possible to do this without a cryptocurrency. It takes some political will though. But then again, it also takes political will to prevent cryptocurrency exchanges from being shut down if they truly threatened central banks.

US wire transfers seem to depend entirely on goodwill of banks. I regularly send wires between Wells Fargo and Schwab, and they always complete in a few hours. Yes, it sucks that banks get away with bad service. But routing money through unregulated cryptobanks isn’t a long-term fix because the regulators will come for them.