TRON announced its partnership with Tether to bring USDT onto the TRON blockchain in early March. To educate the general public on stablecoins, TRON hosted a second event of the educational series in San Francisco on April 9, 2019 for more than 60 people.
Sam Trautwein, CEO of Carbon Money, delivered a thorough stablecoins overview and introduction. CarbonUSD provides the benefits of cryptocurrencies, without the volatility. Its price is stable and coins are backed one-to-one with US dollars.
“Stablecoins bridge the gap between legacy and future banking” — Trautwein
Dan Schatt, President of Cred, also gave a presentation on stablecoins and lending. Cred is a decentralized global lending platform that facilitates open access to credit anywhere and anytime.
We then jumped into a very exciting panel moderated by Angela Yang, Events Manager at TRON. We asked our panelists questions about purpose, success, and issues with stablecoins. How do they benefit the crypto ecosystem and will they help in mainstream adoption.
We were very fortunate to invite some experts in the industry to a speaker panel at this event:
- Esteban Castano — Co-founder & CEO of TRM Labs, which helps the leading digital asset companies understand their users, grow fast, and stay compliant. Prior to TRM Labs, Esteban designed digital growth strategies at McKinsey & Company.
- Benedict Chan — CTO of BitGo, a company that offers a multisignature bitcoin wallet service, where keys are divided among a number of owners to manage risk. As CTO of BitGo, Ben Chan leads the engineering team and is responsible for the company’s technological architecture and innovation. Ben began building Bitcoin and blockchain infrastructure projects in 2012, including wallet platforms, key management, early blockchain identity management, and machine to machine payments.
- Rafael Cosman — CTO of TrustToken, a platform to create asset-backed tokens that you can easily buy and sell around the world. Prior to TrustToken, Rafael was the Co-Founder of StreetCode Academy and raised $1mm+ for Stanford students to teach high-quality tech education programs for thousands of youth of color. He was also a Machine Learning Engineer at Google.
- Chris Banbury — VP of BD at Prime Trust. Prime Trust is doing to the traditional trust industry what Paypal did to merchant processing; completely disrupting it by writing software that brings services to the masses and that business partners can build on top of. Chris is a distributed ledger business development expert who understands global markets and speaks conversational Mandarin Chinese. He’s passionate about the interplay between distributed ledgers, cryptocurrencies, and traditional finance at international scales.
- Nelson Chen — Head of BD at Neutral Project. By aggregating a basket of other stablecoins, the Neutral Dollar generates a lower volatility token with a more subdued risk profile than any individual stablecoin today. Prior to Neutral Project, Nelson was an analyst at BlackRock and research consultant at WorldQuant. He studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech and Finance at the University of Texas.
Key highlights from the panel:
- Stablecoins are the most useful development in crypto in the past couple of years. It’s a huge onramp to crypto. It is something familiar the consumers can latch on to. Stableoins will be used in crypto native applications.
- There will be many different use cases for stablecoins in the long run. There will be different stablecoins for different uses.
- Certain types of business in crypto, such as stablecoins, liquidity providers and exchanges, do very well with volatility. Volatility is good for stablecoins; as the primary use case for stablecoins is crypto trading, the more volatility, the more trading, and the more people are using stablecoins.
