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If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, we (Seb & Chevy) love innovation.
Which is why we got all kinds of giddy when we heard Elizabeth Stark, the CEO of Lightning Labs, discuss how far they’ve gotten with development towards hosting stablecoins on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Here’s three reasons why this would be cool:
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Errbody loves to save money on fees – Visa and Mastercard typically charge 1-3%. By using the BTC Lightning Network, transaction fees for the BTC Stablecoin would be “a cent or less than that.”
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Unlike some of the other stablecoin providers, BTC is easily the most decentralized.
When BTC was created, Satoshi didn’t take an initial investment from any VC firms who now own a huge percentage of equity 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 that exists.
Without getting too technical, here’s how it’ll work:
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 lots of transactions, validates them off-chain, and then just the first and last transaction are validated back 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 enable anyone to spend crypto, in the same way they would use a USD debit card today, just for a cheaper price (through lower fees).
Now that’s innovation!
