Worldcoin’s Nairobi warehouse was raided on Saturday by Kenyan police, which confiscated documents and machines for study, according to local news reports. Tools for Humanity, the company behind the digital identity project which has stirred controversy with its iris scanners (and was officially banned by Kenya authorities last week), apparently failed to disclose its “true intentions” when it registered in the country, Immaculate Kassait, commissioner of the Office of the Data Protection, said. The police were reportedly served a search warrant. Worldcoin officially launched in July and used zero-knowledge proofs and other technologies to create a universal ID and eventual UBI system, but has drawn criticism from the public and governments since the idea was announced in 2021.
Sino Suit
Sino Global Capital, the venture firm founded by crypto influencer Matthew Graham, has filed a $67.3 million claim against FTX Trading Ltd. on behalf of the Sino Liquid Value fund backed by Sam Bankman-Fried in 2021. The fund aimed to raise $200 million via high net worth individuals (it ultimately raised $90 million with FTX as a main backer), and marked a departure for Sino, as the first time the firm sought outside capital through a formal fund vehicle. FTX is going through a reorganization led by bankruptcy lawyer John J. Ray III, who said he’d be willing to sue former business partners and charities to clawback misappropriated funds. As a prominent Solana investor Graham had forged close associations with FTX – in mid-July, Sino hired former FTX COO and SBF confidant Constance Wang to head its gaming unit.
Buy and Hold
Investors would have gained more buying and holding bitcoin (BTC) than investing in crypto hedge funds during the first half of 2023, according to a research report by 21e6 Capital, a Swiss-based investment adviser that tracks more than 700 crypto funds. Crypto funds returned an average of 15% during the period versus BTC’s 83% gain, with active funds following market trends fairing the worst with just 6.8% returns. The reason? In part, hedge funds went into the year with larger-than-typical cash positions to help mitigate risks after the collapse of FTX, which made reaction times slower, 21e6 said. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy’s bitcoin investment is nearly back in the black after recording $1 billion in losses on paper at the time Michael Saylor stepped down as CEO.
There are so many theories and ideas flying around about this and so, naturally, I have one million questions about PayPal’s U.S. stablecoin. Here are five.
Why would PayPal issue a stablecoin, despite regulatory uncertainty in the U.S.?
There’s certainly regulatory uncertainty in the U.S., but PayPal is big enough to actually influence regulators. Take a moment to reflect on the companies, stakeholders and individuals who are complaining about onerous crypto regulation stateside. It’s crypto natives and companies like Coinbase and Circle, which set up Centre Consortium to issue the second largest stablecoin USDC.
Meanwhile the entrenched powers, like BlackRock, laugh in the face of regulatory uncertainty. The message from the big players is “thanks for trailblazing, y’all, but this is how you apply the pressure back.”
What are potential use cases and benefits of PYUSD for the average consumer?
This is a bit unclear at the moment. The potential uses and benefits for the average consumer for a truly decentralized U.S. dollar stablecoin are pretty supportable. With those, you have a borderless, (theoretically) uncensorable version of the world’s reserve currency that people excluded from traditional U.S. payment rails can use (like in, say, Argentina or Russia).
Fabulous. Cool.
But PayPal is rolling PYUSD out in the United States through Venmo. Venmo only works in the United States and requires a bank account to use. PYUSD use in Venmo is basically just another new way for banked Americans to transact with some digital representation of the U.S. dollar, which is basically how all PayPal products have operated since founding.
That said, PYUSD will purportedly be able to be sent outside of PayPal’s walled garden over the Ethereum network. So perhaps, individuals who are banned from using Venmo or PayPal in the United States could get their money off of PayPal via an Ethereum-based withdrawal of PYUSD.
In reality, PayPal would probably just not allow that (since, let’s face it, this stablecoin is not even pretending to be decentralized), but if getting frozen funds out of PayPal develops as a genuine use case for PYUSD then the benefit of the virtuous cycle of an oppressive banking system will accrue to PayPal (and the consumer with the frozen funds, but to PayPal too).
Realistically, the use cases and benefits of PYUSD won’t apply to the consumer at all and will instead become some sort of wonky bank-end thing for financial institutions to exploit and use.
How will PYUSD make money?
PayPal and Venmo make money as payment processors, but PYUSD lives in stablecoin land and we know stablecoin issuers make money differently. Stablecoin issuers hold interest-bearing instruments with customer funds and give none of the yield to their customers. The issuer takes the spread. Thanks to rising interest rates, PYUSD has become a viable product for PayPal to pursue.
And with PayPal explicitly saying it will hold T-bills, the PYUSD move is in the end unsurprising with our 20/20 hindsight. Here’s a way to make money, so let’s make some money.
What does this mean for Circle, Tether and the digital dollar?
Here’s the big open question that I don’t have an answer for. Assuming PYUSD will be as popular as the hype around it suggests, Circle and Tether are in for some healthy competition.
From Circle’s perspective, a bigger company is coming for its crown as the “regulated” stablecoin and from Tether’s perspective a bigger company is coming for its crown as “the” stablecoin. Of course, the hype around PYUSD needs to be met with actual demand for this to change anything. That remains to be seen.
As for a “digital dollar,” a hypothetical (and almost universally hated) Federal Reserve issued central bank digital currency (CBDC), here comes yet another dent against the retail version of the CBDC. Why would the U.S. government bother with a digital dollar when it could get a private enterprise to handle the logistics of payment flow and surveillance?
It wouldn’t.
The Big Question: Is something new or is this just “same old”?
Still, with all the fresh hype, some people maintain that this isn’t really much of anything. A tweet from Coin Center’s Neeraj Agrawal gets at this viewpoint indirectly:
That’s right. PayPal lets people pay each other with a digital representation of a reserve of money held by the company. PYUSD isn’t new. This is just a new wrapper on the same old thing. Just another example of a big company latching onto a trend to make some more revenue to satisfy its fiduciary duty to shareholders.
The continued popularity of cryptocurrency – and the use of traditional payment rails to invest in, trade or use crypto – means that it is nearly impossible for traditional financial services and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to operate in isolation from one another. In other words, anyone who wants access to crypto is reliant on traditional banking rails in the first instance.
From the banking perspective, an institution may maintain a direct relationship with a VASP through the provision of direct banking services to an exchange. Banks can also be indirectly exposed to VASPs, as bank clients use their accounts to transfer funds via credit, debit, Automated Clearing House (ACH) or other fiat-denominated mechanisms to fund crypto wallets.
