** Firms from Uber to Amazon are diving into stablecoins **
For a company like Amazon, moving money around the world is expensive.
Those sales are denominated in local currencies, which means the company has to account for foreign exchange risk and currency fluctuations that potentially cost it billions of dollars.
* Stablecoins can drastically improve their capital efficiency. Now you can move $100 million from country to country in one second versus waiting days. *
PayPal has launched its own stablecoin. The online brokerage Robinhood and payments giant Mastercard have both joined a consortium in which members can mint, or create, the stablecoin USDG. And companies like Amazon, Apple, and Meta are already exploring stablecoins for payouts.
Traditional credit card payments are fairly expensive.
Of course, those fees are even higher for cross-border transactions.
But credit cards and debit cards are really popular.
Crypto boosters also say there’s a growing business case for stablecoins. Stablecoins, which are separate from more volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, promise a more efficient form of payments—the ability to send digital dollars at near-instantaneous speeds and with lower costs. This potentially upends how companies approach anything from global treasury management to paying staffers and contractors around the world.
However, as the technology remains early and its regulatory future uncertain, analysts who spoke with Fortune also voiced skepticism that Silicon Valley’s tech giants would widely adopt stablecoins in the near future.
As stablecoin regulation nears completion in Congress, there’s little downside for Big Tech to experiment with new technology, said Sebastian, the Baird analyst. “One of the common features or common elements of a lot of the Big Tech companies,” he said, “is that they are very open to experiment and try new things.”
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Source: Yahoo/Fortune
