Recently, Circle's listing and subsequent surge have not only caught the attention of traditional financial investors towards stocks of crypto-related companies, but also drawn crypto ecosystem investors to focus on such companies in the US stock market.
Among these, Circle and Coinbase are the most closely watched.
Although both are crypto companies, their businesses and points of focus differ significantly.
Regarding Circle, people are concerned with its stablecoin issuance business and the revenue it generates.
I saw online data suggesting that payments and settlements using stablecoins can save 85% in fees compared to traditional Visa and Mastercard.
In fact, stablecoins have been used by traditional financial institutions for quite some time. To my recollection, JP Morgan attempted to use its own defined "stablecoin" for settlements within its network several years ago, utilizing Ethereum technology. According to reports at the time, this settlement system was highly efficient.
However, although that settlement system utilized Ethereum technology, it was a private chain, fundamentally different from the public blockchain everyone discusses today. Additionally, that "stablecoin" was not a true token but more like an accounting symbol.
Since institutions like JP Morgan conducted experiments so early and recognized its efficiency, why haven't they tried to promote stablecoin development over the years, nor invested in early financing of companies like Circle? Instead, asset management firms like BlackRock have been aggressively pushing forward and negotiating with the SEC?
Several potential "benefits" from stablecoin payments have caused Circle to surge while Visa and Mastercard plummet.
It seems many investors believe the latter could potentially be disrupted by the former.
However, Circle's current main business is only stablecoin issuance, without much involvement in stablecoin payment services, while Visa and Mastercard's core business is payment, not currency issuance.
I believe the company directly conflicting with Visa/Mastercard's payment business is not Circle, but Coinbase. Because Coinbase has launched its payment application and is actively developing stablecoin payment integration with offline and online companies.
Looking from a longer-term perspective, I believe stablecoin payment is just building a payment channel for future application scenarios, but what truly opens up imagination is not the payment channel, but the business scenarios and models that can utilize this channel.
So what are the business scenarios and models that can utilize this channel?
It's payment based on AI Agents.
In the future, even when humans use stablecoins for payment, the possible scenario might only be humans triggering specific needs, while need fulfillment, execution, and payment are completed by AI Agents.
AI Agents are the true users of stablecoin payments. And this is precisely a direction Coinbase is developing.
Of course, most of these ideas are still in the imagination stage. What will be realized in the future and what actual effects can be achieved, I think we'll at least need to wait for Coinbase's next quarterly report, which will be in August this year.
I hope in that report I can see Coinbase disclose specific profitability from stablecoin payments, so we can truly see its actual effects and real yield.
From this perspective, focusing on crypto companies listed on US stocks has a significant advantage:
Being able to see the real yield generated by crypto ecosystem applications from their financial reports - something that most current crypto companies/projects severely lack.
The revenue situation of many crypto companies/projects is essentially opaque to investors, so they eventually can only attract investors by storytelling and hyping BTC, supporting market value.
In the future, when crypto companies listed on US stocks present real financial reports and unveil this mysterious veil, a large batch of projects currently surviving only by storytelling without real revenue may be eliminated en masse.
