The Dollar That Fits in Your Pocket

I’ve been thinking about stablecoins a lot lately, kinda the way you think about some tech thing that suddenly starts showing up everywhere. It feels like they were this quiet little niche until earlier this year, and then, after Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the whole thing just… shifted. Almost overnight. And suddenly you had European banks staring over the fence like, hey, maybe we should get into this too. You can sort of feel the envy there, this long-standing thing about the dollar being the center of gravity for global finance. They’ve lived with it for decades, and now stablecoins kinda make that spotlight even brighter.

What gets me is how the US didn’t even need to force anything. Just by allowing stablecoins to grow inside the usual banking umbrella, the country basically made a bigger stage for the dollar. These tokens run on dollar reserves, Treasury bills, all that safe stuff. So if people want stablecoins, they need dollars behind them. It’s funny how simple that is when you look at it. More stablecoins, more demand for dollars. And the officials saying it out loud, like, this will only make the dollar stronger… they’re not being subtle.

But I keep circling back to the people who actually feel the difference. The ones in developing countries. It’s easy to forget how rough some of these currencies get, the inflation spikes that eat up savings, or banking systems that honestly feel like they’re stuck in a different era. So people try to hold dollars, but that usually means long lines, annoying forms, fees that make you wonder if the bank even wants you there. And stablecoins kinda sidestep all of that. Just a phone. That’s it. You can hold a digital dollar the same way you hold a message thread or a photo.

When you think about the number—1.4 billion adults unbanked—it’s pretty wild. Not everyone has a bank, but everyone seems to have a phone. And that weird mismatch is basically the crack where stablecoins slide in and start doing real work. Sub-Saharan Africa shows it in a pretty raw way. Forty percent of all crypto volume there is stablecoins now. People even pay more than the face value just to get them, which tells you everything about how badly they want something that doesn’t fall apart week to week.

And then there’s remittances. That whole lifeline of money families depend on, except the fees have always been brutal. The average almost hits 8 percent. That’s the kind of thing you just accept because the alternatives are slower or worse. But stablecoins cut those numbers down, and the Kenyan pilot really stuck with me: from almost 30 percent down to 2. That’s insane. That’s not a small tweak, that’s people keeping money they earned instead of watching it leak out on the way home.

Another part of this that’s kinda hard to ignore is China. The Belt and Road loans, the debt issues, the countries handing over ports or infrastructure because they can’t repay. It’s uncomfortable, honestly. And stablecoins, plus all this tokenized finance stuff, give those countries an actual alternative. Like, they can raise money from their own citizens or the diaspora instead of running back to Beijing for another high-pressure loan. It’s not a magic fix, but it’s a real option. Sometimes that’s all countries need.

Meanwhile, central banks keep trying to push their own digital currencies. CBDCs sounded so promising on paper, but the results have been… flat. The Nigerian eNaira experiment basically evaporated. People opened wallets and then just didn’t use them anymore. They still choose stablecoins because those actually help them. And the research about CBDCs not moving GDP or inflation at all—it kinda confirms what everyone already sensed. If a digital currency doesn’t solve a real problem, people won’t touch it.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is stablecoins somehow created this weird alignment where the US strengthens the dollar and developing countries get more freedom at the same time. Cheaper payments, safer savings, ways to raise capital without getting trapped by someone else’s terms. Nothing flashy, just small pieces that add up.

and maybe that’s why this whole thing feels bigger than it looks. Like the early version of something that’ll quietly reshape global finance without making a big show of it. Digital dollars drifting into pockets all over the world, almost casually, but doing real work where it matters.