[toomuchtodo]

They want to control payment rails. FedNow is live (offered by the federal reserve) and can move up to $1M with a 20 second SLA for ~5 cents. Walmart is implementing it for “pay by bank” to avoid ~$1B/year in interchange fees.

Stablecoins are useful when your use case calls for avoiding traditional, sanctioned financial infra, including the ability to move value between counterparties who may not be given access to traditional financial systems.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491

[rvz]

> FedNow is live (offered by the federal reserve) and can move up to $1M with a 20 second SLA for ~5 cents. Walmart is implementing it for “pay by bank” to avoid ~$1B/year in interchange fees.

Does FedNow operate outside of the US?

[toomuchtodo]

No, good callout, cross border fiat token transfers. Central banks are working on native cross border transactions through faster/instant payment system interoperability (Bank for International Settlements working group). Think plugging FedNow into Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), and SEPA (Europe) (just a few examples, there are ~80 instant payment systems in the world as of this comment [1]). You're just pushing XML messages over a bus (ISO 20022 [2]).

[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022

[axelwang]

Isn't Volt trying to build the cross-border version of this? I was actually not familiar with "pay by bank" before, but it sounds like it makes stablecoins even less attractive for the low-margin business use case a16z (and I am sure there are others) is advocating for.

[toomuchtodo]

Not familiar with Volt, their content marketing instant payment map was simply convenient when I searched for one (as I haven’t had time to pay someone to make a Wikipedia page yet with the same content).

[nextts]

SLA? Do I get my 5c back if it takes more than 20s?