On The Origin of Specie (abridged) 💸🙊
South Florida Travelogue
Last week we published this magnum opus.
By popular request, we are releasing an abridged version of this post. Mandatory reading in advance of tomorrow’s Llama Party at 8 AM PT with Josh Fraser of Origin Protocol
On the Origin of Specie
When en route to Mar-a-Lago, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South Florida.
I’d often imagined Florida as an evolutionary time capsule: a caricature of an intact ecosphere that served as a tropical Darwinian laboratory. The protohuman inhabitants were rumored to still engage in primitive practices like cannibalism and face-eating. To hear the tales of the tabloids, the fabled “Florida Man” fell somewhere between Java Man and Piltdown Man in the taxonomy of pre-hominid great apes.
Thus my surprise to discover the forces of civilization had taken root in these primitive jungles. From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Thrust into competition against the general populace, some inhabitants have adapted by embracing economies constructed atop complex decentralized ledgers. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of specie—the snapshot in history when humans first stepped from the primitive oceans of paper currency and embraced stablecoins.
Monkey Business
Natural selection teaches that orderly civilization doesn’t spring gently from peaceful collaboration—it flows turbulently downstream from no-holds-barred competition for survival. It’s conflict all the way down.
Appropriately enough, Darwin’s grand unifying theory didn't exactly unify—it ignited centuries of bitter division. Half of humanity indignantly rejected kinship with apes, perhaps understandably, given how often humans behave as the less evolved side of the family tree
The voyage of the HMS Beagle occurred in a distant era, separated by over a century and multiple world wars. The intervening time has been long enough to permit entirely new technologies to cycle through invention, dominance, and extinction: bygone now are the fax, modem, and pager. In 2025, stablecoins might represent the latest phase of creative destruction. The entire modern financial rails that evolved over the past half-century might simply be killed by the rapid ascent of stablecoins.
As usual, however, revolutions don’t come easy. Congress is considered the antonym of progress. What might appear to be the obvious next technological paradigm has once again become another circus exhibit among the knuckle-draggers in Washington DC. The stablecoin bill, an obvious net positive for America, has dragged out for years.
As this article goes to publication, it appears possible to pass, although the sudden success of Trump’s $USD1 stablecoin threatened to become a political wedge issue, after a $2 billion injection catapulted it into the top ten of the ever-malleable stablecoin leaderboard. Stalling by Congress would only limit their own ability to oversee the stablecoin. Prolonging political chaos only benefits the person at the helm of the executive branch, his stablecoin might already be grandfathered into systemic importance by the time any legislation is already signed.
Only 9 stablecoin projects hold a market cap above $1 billion. Although this remains insignificant compared to the 18 trillion dollar M1 monetary supply, it also demonstrates stablecoins already edging into “too-big-to-fail” levels of importance.
More importantly, this top tier of stablecoins are all centralized or sprinting in this general direction. Every single project on this list has a receptionist you could dial up to place an order directly. The list includes stablecoin pioneers (USDT, USDC), existing financial giants executing a successful pivot onchain (BlackRock, PayPal) and quasi-DeFi players in the process of shedding the vestiges of decentralization in favor of access to capital (Sky, Ethena).
Once the genie is out of the bottle, it won’t be possible to force it back in. There may be short-term benefits to stalling crypto legislation, but too many of the financial titans / big DC donors are embracing stablecoins. This past year was a clear inflection point…
Centralized stablecoins will sort themselves out after an appropriate level of debate; decentralized stablecoin issuers are likely to continue having a mini-boomlet amidst the turmoil, even if stablecoin legislation stalls forever.
Open stablecoins market caps are hitting all-time highs. Consider $GHO, above $250MM
$crvUSD is approaching $200MM amidst the Resupply boom
To the delight of newsletter subscribers, the OPEN stablecoin index launched from the pages of this blog just last month.
An $OPEN Book 📚💵
A follow-up on last week’s airdrop for subscribers… in which we “open the kimono” a bit with some lite alfalfa
OPEN offers the only clear way for speculators to gamble on the “stablecoin” narrative. As a yardstick of sentiment, it’s clear the stablecoin meta has oomph. OPEN price is up a shocking 50% in just a month.
Open stablecoins may be the most intensely interesting facet of the stablecoin industry — stablecoins that cling to decentralization, while benefitting from fully centralized players jockeying for power. As the giants wrestle, the boundaries separating centralized and decentralized stablecoins get blurred. The decentralized dollar projects catch the spillover, as they see their market caps erupt upwards with the gracefulness of a collision of tectonic plates.
Truly decentralized stablecoins may fall outside the scope of any legislation, but what of all the projects caught within the overlap? Best to move to one side or the other, and do it quickly.
Relative to Bitcoin’s cypherpunk ideals, the STABLE Act might be considered shockingly Orwellian by these proto-libertarian standards. Some clauses considered for inclusion in any proposed stablecoin legislation:
KYC on all issuers
Prohibitions on yield
Surveillance mandates for “unhosted wallets”
Implicit bans on any stablecoin not “U.S.-issued”
A whole tier of US cryptocurrency and stablecoin projects fall into the crosshairs, and suddenly their surviving interest demands they interject their voice in the conversation.
American Exceptionalism
In the earliest days of this blog, the Curve community affectionately dubbed me “Blue Suit Man.” In the lockdown era, dressing up was a historical relic that made it easy to distinguish oneself from the crowd. Thus, the most jarring part of the wholly incongruous event invitation pushed into my inbox was the phrase “cocktail attire — jackets required.”
How far the crypto industry has come in a short decade. From MS Paint doodles of stick figures wizard hats touting “magic internet money” to Mar-a-Lago, a palace of opulence looming large over Florida’s flattened terrain.
My past experiences in the city of Miami were plenty scuzzy, so I was surprised to learn how nice Palm Beach is by contrast. The beaches are so free of debris and detritus you can jog barefoot in the sands at sunrise. Perhaps Presidential standards wouldn’t have it any other way.
I departed for the ceremonies in my humble and fuel-efficient Toyota Corolla, a practical-minded midsize rental selected to optimize Curve’s runway. As I puttered towards the private party, police cars popped up with increasing frequency. The parked vehicles rotated their sirens nonstop in a show of security for the hub of power. This was a notable level of precaution considering the president was thousands of miles away at the time.
I was admittedly trepidatious as I continued passing cop cars on the approach “What should I do,” I’d inquired of the event host, “just type Mar-A-Lago into my GPS and knock politely on the front door?” With enough security to correspond to a 4-star wanted rating in Grand Theft Auto, I needed to formulate a better plan.
My hopes of just driving into the Mar-a-Lago parking lot were dashed as traffic bottlenecked further in front of the palatial retreat. The roads were dropped to a lane, and the entrance was blocked by cones and constabulary to confirm I couldn’t just cruise right up to the clubhouse.
Now I’m not only going to be late to the event, but it’s going to look mighty suspicious trying to hang a U-ee here in front of all these police. Did my humble rental car even have a sufficient turning radius sufficient to execute such a daring maneuver? Would the police opt to shoot first and later try to piece together the crazy person’s plan? I guess we’ll find out…
I hazarded to turn into the next available turnoff, a concrete island in which I’d hoped to negotiate a three-point turnabout. As I steered into the lot, I noticed it was peopled with two divergent groups. One boasted resplendent suits and gowns as they patiently boarded a shuttle bus. The other donned dark sunglasses and walked about intently. Secret service?
A menacing agent and his toothy K9 friend approached the window: “Sir, can you please place your vehicle in idle, pop the trunk and release the hood?” Easy there, pal, I can hardly operate the wipers on this thing. Will they shoot me for stalling if I have to leaf through the owner’s manual?
After several tense minutes, the satisfied agent barked into his earpiece “Toyota’s clear.” As my pulse dropped to a typical resting rate, I slowly maneuvered the vehicle in the direction of Mar-A-Lago. The various agents, no longer blocking my path, instead marched in unison to clear the various cones and cars blocking my path, and used their influence to block the path of oncoming arterial traffic to ease my drive.
As I drove onto the luxurious property, the security squad seemed to vanish. I was empowered to drive anywhere I liked on the palatial estate, right up to the cavernous front entrance. The signage hinted the only viable course was to get the car into the care of the valet… unless it was expected I should veer into the service corridors. I caught up with an Aston Martin and Bugatti Veyron, after which the confused valet reluctantly accepted the key to my humble Corolla as if he’d never witnessed such a contraption. Take good care of it please, the good folks at Budget wouldn’t appreciate a scratch!
Stepping into Mar-A-Lago proved a throwback to the most severe excesses of the gilded age. The entry chamber was adorned with unsubtle gold-leaf, rococo extravagance, and extremely eager-to-please help.
Photos were of course prohibited in the stateroom, but we grabbed this from some simple internet sleuthing. Leaking to friendly press outfits is common in both the northern and southern capital buildings:
Missing from these spreads is a few of the newer embellishments and knickknacks mythologizing the 47th President’s administration. Against one wall sat freshly cast pewter bust of Trump, holding one fist upward, declaring “Fight, Fight, Fight,” a headline that feels so close I could touch it, already hardening into history.
I’ll always be an awkward fit among high society, and this event at the upper edge of the corridors of power proved no exception. I wandered aimlessly, descending an outdoor staircase toward a registration desk. Sorting invitees alphabetically seemed to be overkill for an event capped at 25 attendees, and it dawned on me that our crypto gathering was a mere sideshow.
The main event was a mixer for a politician paying heavy to curry favor with the President. Pay-to-play is precisely how the grist mill of power politics grinds in 2025. Insert yourself as a mainstay fixture in the social scene, and you’re sure to gain notice over time.
Indeed, the “crypto” event that brought me to the other side of the country was scarcely noticeable. From a portico situated aside, our small band of crypto misfits could only peer into the gala headliner event. Our influence would be confined into a chance collision with other parties busy admiring the artifacts adorning the common stateroom. For the dinner, we’d preach only amongst ourselves. If we wanted to do more than scarcely register as a blip, we’d need to become Mar-a-Lago regulars before we might start to merit attention.
Some of the protocols in attendance might be ready to play this game out of necessity. The grand prize for centralized stablecoins is access to the mainstream institutions and their priority access to the money printer. However, securing such access requires perfectly playing these parlor games.
With Curve anchoring the decentralized stablecoin narrative, legislative success is desirable, but by no means mandatory. Before I departed, I’d asked Gabe Shapiro of MetaLeX for some talking points, in case we had the opportunity to rub shoulders with important regulators and drop our talking points:
The big issue for DeFi in the regulations is that everyone is focused on securities laws & giving all authority to the CFTC; meanwhile the CEA is a mandatory *intermediation* regime.
For DeFi derivatives (margin, leverage, perps, swaps (swaps could include many stablecoins, stETH, etc.)), this would be a death knell and no one seems particularly focused on this issue.
A good point indeed, but sadly one that didn’t get an suitable hearing.
Even clinging to the decentralization wing of the stablecoin axis, Curve will always see intersection with centralized entities. A variety of centralized stablecoins have leveraged Curve directly or indirectly, famously including BlackRock via Elixir dUSD
Dec. 3, 2024: Once You Go BlackRock 🖤🪨
Congrats to Only “Just” Jousting on the launch of the new Curve DAO frontend!
Of course, the actual ebb and flow of Curve activity depends on a variety of factors. PayPal’s pyUSD made a big splash when it first appeared on Curve… then the hype dissipated somewhat at the organization was meant to be maneuvering instead toward Solana… then Berachain… desperately twisting to get over the coveted $1 billion market
Now it seems PayPal is running back onto Ethereum? It seems as if everything always leads back to mainnet. Whensoever it does, a variety of pools continue to keep printing for Curve. In the 24 hours prior to the first publication of the article, the following 13 pools minted over $1K in fees:
If centralized stablecoins all but disappeared, Curve revenues would suffer little immediate negative impact, as it is a strong enough hub for decentralized stablecoins.
The bull case is that we know centralized stablecoins ultimately find their way onto Curve in nearly any scenario. If stablecoins do capture the multitrillion dollar market cap everybody is expecting, even a small portion of these stablecoins on Curve could radically reshape these top pools, and Curve trading volume.
For other participants, it’s much more life or death. Origin, the gracious and capable hosts for the event, has yield-bearing stablecoin products in the form of OETH and OUSD. A ban on yield-bearing stablecoins written into some drafts of the Stablecoin bill would be devastating to their business. At dinner I talked a long time with their tech team about all the innovative mechanisms at work to set their stablecoin apart, good fodder for an upcoming article. Yet despite all their innovation, Origin finds their game nowadays is not so much building exemplary technology, but trying to get their voice heard in the halls of political influence.
Will one dinner at Mar-a-Lao make a difference? The Congressman’s fundraiser downstairs, seemingly a staple on the calendar of high society, seems sure to facilitate seamless mixing among public and private elites. A single dinner tucked away in a side room at Mar-a-Lago? If these events become routine, then the crypto community will surely get a foothold within the corridors of power.
A one-off dinner is a good start, but we were all several courses away from securing our industry’s dominance. Not that this would be the roughest task. Don’t let the 2.5 star rating on Google Maps fool you, this is probably more a reflection of our polarized political era than a legitimate restaurant review. The chefs were not stingy with the steak, and the assembled agreed it was more than satisfactory.
What does it cost to host an event like this? Origin happened to have a friend who was a member of Mar-A-Lago and therefore eligible to host events like this. The specific fees required to allow this were unclear, but somewhere in the range of $200K to $2MM per year depending on who you asked.
Herein lies the root of the ethical quandary overshadowing the entire event. It’s always been the case that the top 1% of wealth has had disproportionate access to the top 1% of power dating back to when humans formed loose tribes to hunt mammoths. Try to design a political structure without fundraising dinners inevitably costing hundreds of dollars per plate… it’s as difficult as designing a blockchain without eventually auctioning off block building. Wherever great demand exists to exert influence over power, economics requires supply adjust to match. If politicians don’t redirect these fees directly into their coffers, external actors will certainly intercede and pocket the proceeds of gatekeeping.
Historically, politicians sent these funds directly to their political campaign. The Trumpian twist is to productize this graft within his private hospitality business, piping the profits into his complex web of businesses. It’s a uniquely venal approach, and certainly gifts his most ardent opponents yet more ammunition to fire back in his direction. Perhaps that’s the point, for a man who so enjoys the mud wrestling aspects of politics?
For the most part, the crypto representatives gathered at the Mar-a-Lago crypto summit swore fealty up and down to the new Trump administration. Following the ridiculous overreaches of the Biden administration, even a less heavyhanded approach would certainly have sufficed to earn the crypto community’s goodwill. The fact that the Trump administration has gone significantly further, reversing course from Biden and offering substantial policy overtures towards the crypto community, it’s little surprise to see they’ve earned such undying allegiance.
Was anybody in attendance anything but a loyal foot soldier? A few members confessed some mild reservations, gesturing around at the general grandiloquence to suggest the impropriety of requiring access to power flow through this lavish setup. One denizen of New York lamented that “cryptocurrency” had become a dirty word among the extremely left-wing parents at his child’s Upper West Side private school that he couldn’t mention his career.
Perhaps this is the point that nagged most at me over the subsequent days. It’s tough to stomach the concept of crypto becoming a permanently partisan issue. The technology is supposed to be bigger than nation-states, not at the mercy of insipid political debates. Paraphrasing Origin CEO Josh Fraser’s memorable quip at the event:
“I thought it far more likely we’d be meeting in a prison cell, not Mar-a-Lago.”
Indeed, crypto is maturing. For years there was no conferences, just Telegram chats and Discord rooms. Then we graduated to meeting up in T-shirts and jeans in dingy dive bars. Now, the gathered crowd looked smart in full suit and tie. It’s what we need to do if we’re going to be chasing institutional money, right?
Attracting institutions was certainly the main topic of conversation at the event. After all, if the institutions enter in size, nobody in power will be able to force them out. However, more than one attendee expressed pessimism at the thought that institutions and crypto were a natural fit. Traditional financial players value transactional privacy too much to see much appeal in public blockchains. Why give away your edge? The existing financial system, clunky as it may be, redounds to their benefit — why change it?
This revelation was almost as tough to swallow as dessert. I’d long ago surrendered my sweet tooth, so I nearly skipped out on the gold-flecked final course. However the waitress was persuasive… “If you’ve never been, you have to try the Trump cake!”
Like its namesake, the cake was large, rich, and decadent… and a bit much for my taste. I ate a few bites and joined the general party as we spilled over to mingle with the general assemblage. Rumors abounded that the President himself would arrive late, according to his daily schedule. Yet the chance encounter was not in the cards. Not that the city council’s authority superseded the President’s private club, but nonetheless the club staff was winding down and attendees made plans to continue the festivities at an afterparty.
Recognizing I was lucky to have committed statistically fewer faux pas than my typical appearance at a social gathering, I opted to stop before any mean reversion came due. I summoned the valet to retrieve my Corolla, and he acted with notable haste to remove the eyesore from the lot.
Need A Stablecoin Act
With the opulent event firmly in the rear view mirror, I had time to digest the surreal experience. Most of the next few days were spent on the road playing tourist, and trying to piece together everything that had just happened.
On the roads of Florida, there’s no shortage of flagrantly diehard Trump supporters. The vehicles look exactly as you’d imagine, beefy pickup trucks masked in bumper stickers and occasionally obscene patriotic slogans as they roar past in the fast lane.
The stark class divide between this segment of the President’s diehard base and his wealthy elite club members is a remarkable coalition of unequals. Does the bottom percentile think the top percentile are looking out for them? Or even grasp how the game is actually played? Although my influence on the administration is certainly nil, my 24 hours in Florida put me a lot closer to the corridors of power than his tribe of loyalists may get in their entire lifetime. The way humans self-organize into packs is as potent as it was when we first descended from the trees, albeit way less straightforward nowadays.
How on earth could I possibly document this event. Maybe it would be best to not to say anything. Politics in the US is a blood sport in 2025. A game of who can imprison the most opponents. I don’t want to get wrapped up in these toxic gangland feuds. What happened to laying low and buying monkey gifs?
The only way I was able to finally rub the glitz and glam of Mar-a-Lago out of my subconscious mind was after the dependable Corolla completed the long drive to the NASA museum. Although most of the theme park elements were schlocky and forgettable, nothing compares to the magnitude of seeing the fruits of the Apollo program up close. I’m not frequently an emotional person, but I had to fight hard to keep the tears back.
They did it all before blockchains, before the internet, and before computers as we know them. As you crane your neck upwards to take in the view of the towering twists of intricate metalwork and complex design, it’s impossible not to feel humbled. You can’t help but think the conspiracy theorists have a point… it’s too difficult a task… too impossible a journey… there’s no way we could possibly have set foot on the moon. Yet somehow, against all odds, we did it.
Then we stopped going back.
We focused on fighting each other instead.
Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the fabled story of our trip to the moon was the unity of purpose. Sending a man to the moon by the end of the decade must have seemed even less possible to a generation that had never done it. Yet thousands of the smartest minds all united around a common purpose and departed our planet.
This all even happened amidst a decade that was meant to be a turbulent social era… Vietnam and the protest movement, the Civil Rights movement. Yet amidst the turmoil, a common purpose emerged. It’s a nice and soppy narrative, and it’s more fun to believe it than to play the skeptic.
Could we get to the moon today? Maybe. Could we do it in unison with a shared purpose? We don’t all get our news from Walter Cronkite — but from a million niche internet microcelebrities. What hope do we have to unite on anything if we can’t even agree who’s allowed to use which restroom. Nowadays, if one half the country tried to build a rocket, the other half might chain itself to the launchpad to stop the launch.
But that’s the very crux of evolutionary theory, innit. The massive leaps forward occur because of periods of intense competition, not in spite of them. We don’t make progress during the good times, only during the challenges. It’s the battle that sharpens our wits. The ink only dries in the history books after the winners crush the losers.
If we can’t unite around going to the moon, can we at least pass a stablecoin act? Somehow a bit of legislation as seemingly noncontroversial as “promote US dollars” can’t get unanimity without exploding on the launchpad.
The US government is this weird schizophrenic institution that flip-flops its driving ideological principles every few years, yet still manages to grow itself into the most powerful organization of humans our planet has ever seen. A weird process of natural selection has acted on it over 250 years, to allow it to shed the useless elements of these wild vicissitudes while continually growing its nucleus of power. It’s evolved this way because of its differences, not in spite of them.
On this level, blockchains might be the most miraculous thing we’ve managed to build this century. Recognizing we have no unity of purpose, we’ve created tools and systems for organizing explicitly designed under the premise that nobody can trust anybody else. Bitcoin might be the miracle closest to the Apollo Program we can muster in our era of hyperpolarization. If it was the ever-present threat of predators on the savannahs of Olduvai that selected apes into humans, mayhaps blockchains can allow us to coordinate and level up our game amidst fierce competition.
In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey to Mar-A-Lago at the other side of this country.