TL; DR
Full story
If it wasn’t already obvious, we (Seb & Chevy) Love innovation.
That’s why we got all giddy when we heard Elizabeth Stark, the CEO of Lightning Labs, talk about how far they’ve come in developing stablecoin hosting on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Here are three reasons why this would be cool:
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Errbody likes to save money on fees – Visa and Mastercard typically charge 1-3%. Using the BTC Lightning Network, the BTC Stablecoin transaction fee would be “a penny or less than that.”
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Unlike some other stablecoin providers, BTC is by far the most decentralized.
When BTC was founded, Satoshi did not take an initial investment from venture capital firms that now own a large percentage of shares in the underlying company.
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Did we mention it’s the Bitcoin blockchain?
That in itself is important because it is the oldest (and always will be!) and most secure blockchain in existence.
Without getting too technical, here’s how it works:
A stablecoin (let’s call it ‘BTCUSD’) will be pegged to the US dollar, but all transactions will take place on the BTC Lightning Network, which is super fast and cheap because it takes and validates many transactions. outside the chainand then only the first and last transactions are validated on the BTC network.
Honestly, unless you’re pretty nerdy (like us), the “how does it work” part doesn’t matter as much as the “what can it do for us?” part.
And in short, it will allow anyone to spend crypto the same way they would use a USD debit card today, just at a lower price (through lower fees).
That’s innovation!