There is a hot corner of the usually very public world of crypto in which innovation is quietly crackling and popping, with hundreds of millions of dollars already moving to and fro on a near-daily basis.
Unfortunately though, it has acquired a most uninspiring nickname in the world of crypto, dull enough to glaze the most attentive of eyes. It is this grindy, gnarly, complex set of cogs and wheels that makes commerce chunk away without most people noticing. Until something doesn’t arrive on our doorstep, or on the shelf at our local shop, or in the medicine storage facility at the hospital where our child is awaiting a critical procedure. Then we notice. Loudly and pissed-offedly.
Which brings us to crypto. There are about $160-billion in stablecoins currently residing in various wallets and pools and projects across the crypto space. Much of it is unused, belonging to owners biding their time until opportunity knocks. The price of these stablecoins is, well, stable — no wild volatility here. But all these stablecoin owners would dearly love to attract some fine yields, provided risks are low.
Until RWA became a thing, starting with some small experiments over the last two years and suddenly now the next big thing in institutional finance, with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and the other looming towers of global big money starting to ramp up.The complexities of supply chain and trade finance remain as labyrinthine as ever.
The “protocol” column on the left is a who’s who of the new crypto companies that have sprung up specifically to service this new market opportunity — Goldfinch, Maple, TrueFi, Centrifuge.