was asked to explain why i think stablecoins hurt the value of crypto (and specifically eth). let me try.

in 2021 everyone used eth to buy NFTs. in 2024, everyone used sol to buy memecoins.

*this* is moneyness. eth and sol became the reserve currencies of the internet that everyone needed to buy things.

when you start pricing everything in stablecoins, this is no longer the case. people can just buy usdc, and with a bit of account abstraction, they never need to touch eth or sol at all. the us dollar, not crypto, becomes the reserve currency of the internet.

this doesn't destroy the value of eth or sol, of course. they still have some debated utility as economic security, and they still have revenue from gas that can make them decent businesses, similar to L2s collecting on sequencer fees. you might get a 10-20x valuation on REV, and this is fine.

but it's not moneyness. it's just a business.

and the thing about a business is that it *precludes* moneyness. bitcoin is a decent SoV because it has no valuation framework beyond its own scarcity, similar to gold. a business is a bad SoV because its value actually can be calculated based on revenue. that's not storing value—that's earning it based on fees.

the moment eth and sol cede their currencies to usd, they help their core business by expanding their blockchains to meet the real-world where it is.

but they lose all the moneyness premium that drove people to invest in them in the first place, as well as any possibility of actually creating a global reserve currency that could rise in the fall of the us dollar.