Judging from the current flood of seminars, conferences, papers, articles and social media hype, one would be forgiven for concluding that the future of electronic payments was going to be centred around stablecoins, the now commercially respectable face of crypto. There is no longer any need to choose between clunky, expensive and restrictive traditional finance on the one hand and multiple varieties of potential fairy dust – or cryptocurrency – on the other. Stablecoins – privately issued digital tokens with value tied to fiat assets carried on distributed ledger technology infrastructure – will henceforward offer ... (full story)