> And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
Our (blockchain-adjacent) company received millions in equity investment in the form of stablecoin transfers. Those investors were so heavily “in” crypto, that they didn’t have any liquidity of useful size in any actual fiat currency, so they wouldn’t have been able to invest in us in “real money.” We only got those investments by being willing to accept stablecoins.
Compounding that advantage, there were no exchange fees at any point during the transaction for accepting investments from foreign holders (as they were already holding USDC—where a foreign investor would find it a lot harder to hold actual USD in their local banks); and there were only minimal, flat transfer fees (i.e. gas) to get the whole investment done, as opposed to the percentile fees charged for international wire transfers. I would say that that was a pretty useful use-case for stablecoins.
Of course, when we received these stablecoin investments, we gradually offramped them for actual fiat money. What were we going to do, pay our employees in stablecoins? And at that point we had to pay exchange fees, because we aren’t even a US company ourselves, and so we were off-ramping for our own local currency, not USD. (Though this was cheaper than expected, as we directly off-ramped the USDC to our local currency through a provider that kept liquidity in our local currency. We never needed to get the regular banking infrastructure involved until the final step—depositing fiat money already denominated in our local currency, into our local banks.)
But just because we didn’t have a reason to keep/spend the original stablecoins, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful for the asset to remain in stablecoin form until it reached us. It was certainly more useful to our investors to hold USDC than to hold fiat currency.
> Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
Is there a significant technological difference between the central banks of the US, India, China, Canada, Japan, the UK, etc.? Not really. The difference is that different countries are running them, and those countries are effectively different “political technologies.” The choice comes down to the relative merits of the political technology driving the progress and decision-making in the monetary technology.
In this sense, it’s sort of like if there’s a single open-source project that was originally BSD/MIT-licensed, that has been forked a bunch of times, with each fork replacing that license with something else and establishing a separate “structure” to its maintainership (e.g. one fork being an Apache Software Foundation project; one fork being a reference implementation governed by an enterprise “open-membership” body; one fork being GPLed, run by a BDFL who accepts PRs, but is very opinionated, and suggests you fork their fork if you want to go a different way; etc.) Those are all different “political technologies” driving the same project forward in different directions!