Important to build Stablecoins on Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast,” hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Lightning Lab’s Head of Business Development, Ryan Gentry, to talk about how the company is building the ability to use stablecoins on the Lightning Network with their new Taro protocol.
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Q: I want to talk about stablecoins with you and have this conversation about: Are they necessary within the Bitcoin ecosystem and why or why not?
Ryan Gentry: That’s a great question, and it’s one that really drove our decision to focus on Taro this year.
Rewind to Bitcoin 2021 when we got news about the legal tender law in El Salvador, we got Jack Maller’s amazing presentation. It kick-started this massive wave of emerging market adoption of Lightning, Lightning apps, and Lightning wallets everywhere from Brazil to Argentina to El Salvador, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Vietnam, like all over the world.
I think the coolest part of my job is that I get to work with Bitcoin founders and Bitcoin developers all over the world who are all trying to get Lightning adopted. When we discussed with them all last year when they were hit with tons of new registrations, tons of new adoptions, we were very excited.
As the year began to draw to a close, we kept hearing this repeated from these emerging market entrepreneurs who were like, “OK, this has been the best year ever, huge adoption, numbers up and to the right, and I’ve now got all the Bitcoiners with luck, like in Chiang Mai, Vietnam.” Neutron Pay: “We got all the Bitcoiners. We’ve got them all. They all use our app. It is fantastic. This is great. The next layer of users that we want to get, they want the dollar.”
It was just something that we kept hearing from all over the world, from South America to Africa to Southeast Asia, was that there is this next group of users that we want to include in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but using bitcoin for everyday payments was a bit for. a lot and they really wanted to use the dollar.
Of course, being at Lightning Labs, by definition, you are a Bitcoin maximalist. I think everyone on the team is extremely bullish on bitcoin. We wouldn’t build a payment protocol on top of Bitcoin if we weren’t positive about the bitcoin asset. But we just kept hearing from these real people out in the world, trying to solve real problems and trying to grow the adoption of their apps that they really need the dollar.
I think it’s just one of those things where if we can provide the same Lightning experience, we can bring more users to the Lightning Network, we can help all the startups that are pushing Bitcoin infrastructure and bringing users in and trying to educate users on why bitcoin is important, if we can give them this tool that allows them to reach the next 50,000 users, 100,000 users, million users, I think that’s an absolute win. I think there’s a huge, huge boom for the ecosystem, and it’s just following user demand, which I think is really important.
A side benefit of this that I don’t think is discussed as much is because Taro runs on Bitcoin rails, because it requires a full Bitcoin node, because it requires a Lightning node as well, if we give the market what it wants in stablecoins, we get the benefit as these new companies adopt to spread Bitcoin infrastructure and spread Bitcoin nodes and spread Lightning nodes and Lightning channels to all these places that maybe they wouldn’t necessarily adopt if it was just bitcoin.
I think that’s an understated point, just the proliferation of Bitcoin infrastructure. Because if we are right about which bitcoin the asset is, the demand for the dollar will decrease over time anyway, and this Bitcoin infrastructure will be in place for users to switch demand from USD to BTC. I think it’s a moment that we’re all very excited about and really pushing, but it’s just this stepping stone in the middle where we have to give the people what they want.
