Previously I talked about how Michael Saylor's role was to normalize paper Bitcoin and NOT normalize proof-of-reserves (knowingly or unknowingly).
In short, you would've been more skeptical if Larry Fink's Blackrock was the first Bitcoin paper product that came out.
Instead, a Bitcoin folk hero was used to normalize the idea of "Not your keys, yes your coins".
Something very similar is happening in the financial system.
We are in a transition from the current rails -> regulated stablecoins (plus tokenized deposits) -> phased CBDCs, with years of overlap.
Stablecoins do the heavy lifting of user education, compliance plumbing, and merchant normalization; CBDCs slot in once the UX, legal, and vendor stack are domesticated.
Once crises are triggered, CBDC rollout speeds up, stablecoins get corralled into narrow roles.
The plan is for stablecoins to normalize "programmable money".
They are the Trojan horse for UX, compliance, and merchant behavior:
- They acclimate users to KYC wallets, blacklistable funds, recoveries, and automated tax.
- They give governments a vendor ecosystem (identity, analytics, AML, dispute infra) without owning every app.
- Once routinized, CBDCs can re-platform settlement while keeping the front-end familiar.
Many people will tell you how stablecoins are useful to the US government because they buy treasuries.
However, they are much more useful to the US government because they are the Trojan horse that normalizes programmable money (CBDCs).
