Stablecoins Are the 'Royalists' of the Crypto World: Open USD Brings the Old Monetary System into the Fray
Title: Stablecoins Are the "Royalists" of the Crypto World: Open USD Brings the Old Monetary System into the Fray
The article analyzes the launch of Open USD, a new dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by a coalition of over 140 traditional financial, payment, and tech giants like Visa, BlackRock, and Google. Author Hu Yilin argues that stablecoins like Open USD represent not a "moderate" wing of the crypto revolution, but a "royalist reform" within the old monetary system.
He posits that while stablecoins adopt blockchain's efficiency, programmability, and borderless nature, they fundamentally reinforce the US dollar's centrality and the Federal Reserve's authority. They aim to replace inefficient "bureaucrats" (like traditional payment networks) rather than challenge the "monarch" (the dollar-based system). Thus, Open USD symbolizes the old system co-opting blockchain technology to upgrade dollar hegemony, potentially marginalizing native crypto projects like Circle's USDC.
Hu contrasts this with more revolutionary paths, like a "Bitcoin standard," which seeks to change the monetary base itself. He warns that if the crypto ecosystem's unit of account, collateral, and value anchor remain dollar-denominated stablecoins,链上繁荣 may enrich the traditional financial system ("off-chain") rather than granting monetary premium to native crypto assets like ETH. Projects with civilizational ambitions, he argues, cannot reduce their narrative to mere "fuel" or transaction fees but must grapple with the core revolutionary idea: that a decentralized market does not require a central bank as the anchor of monetary order.
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