With its global nature, efficiency, and programmability, stablecoins have become one of the most influential forms of currency today, quietly reshaping the landscape and rules of global finance.
In July 1944, the smoke of World War II had not yet fully cleared, but the blueprint for a new world was being drawn. Representatives from 44 allied countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, attempting to find a crucial answer for a war-torn world in need of reconstruction: What is money, and who should control it?
This meeting was not the first in history, nor will it be the last. Since the dawn of human civilization, from shells to metals to paper currency, every significant monetary transformation—whether it was the Roman Empire's unified currency system or Newton establishing the gold standard for England—has revolved around an eternal question: Where does the value of money truly come from? Is it its intrinsic scarcity (like gold), or the credit and authority of the sovereign institution that issues it?
At Bretton Woods, the representatives' debates also focused on gold, the dollar, and exchange rates. The system that was ultimately established created a new global financial framework centered around the dollar, linking the dollar to gold, which laid the foundation of our modern international monetary system. This event profoundly revealed that the transformation of money is less about its physical form and more about the interplay of trust, power, and rules. Sovereign nations exercise their economic sovereignty by controlling the issuance of currency, while scarcity is the key validation in maintaining confidence in the currency's value.
Today, we find ourselves at the peak of a new wave of monetary transformation. Stablecoins are the latest manifestation of this change. They seek to redefine the medium of value storage and exchange through technology (such as blockchain) and asset collateralization (like the dollar). The most revolutionary aspect is that trust and power seem to be undergoing a 'decentralization'—trust is partially shifting from reliance on sovereign nations to verification through code, algorithms, and on-chain assets.
