Why the Future Belongs to Stablecoins, Not Scalability
For years, crypto has sold itself on speed. Fast chains. Lightning transactions. TPS wars. From Solana to Avalanche to the next L1 promising to settle trades in microseconds, the narrative has been clear: the faster, the better.
But what if speed isn’t what Web3 actually needs?
On a recent episode of The CoinRock Show, William Quigley — co-founder of Tether, one of the most important innovations in crypto history — made a subtle but powerful case: stability is the real unlock for Web3, not speed. And in that one word, “stability,” he challenged nearly every assumption the industry has clung to.
“The most traded crypto on earth is Tether and it’s not Bitcoin, because it trades against all cryptos,” Quigley said.
“In 2015 I thought by 2030 the majority of the world’s giant economies would have tokenized our currency and I thought that because once you see the advantages of a tokenized currency, it’s one of the rare innovations that has no downside.”
And that’s exactly the point. In a world obsessed with performance benchmarks, it’s easy to forget that crypto still struggles with a basic premise: can people actually use it?
The Real Problem Isn’t Speed — It’s Volatility
Crypto’s Achilles’ heel has never been its lack of technical sophistication. It’s the fact that prices swing so wildly, that it becomes impractical for daily transactions, business planning, or long-term strategy.
“If both sides of a trading pair are moving,” Quigley explained, “it’s kind of a theory as to whether you made money or not, right?”
Before Tether, most trades happened against BTC or ETH — meaning you were constantly balancing one volatile asset against another. Tether changed that. It introduced the concept of a stable unit of account. Suddenly, traders could benchmark their performance, settle trades reliably, and move between tokens without triggering massive price swings.
That’s not just convenience — that’s infrastructure.
While most in the space still see Tether as a “dollar token,” Quigley’s comments revealed a deeper intention: Tether was built to be the base layer of financial interaction. The true genius wasn’t in pegging it to the dollar — it was in understanding that Web3 couldn’t scale without something predictable.
Tether didn’t just make trading easier — it enabled the entire DeFi explosion, the exchange boom, and even NFT commerce by giving users a psychological and economic anchor in an otherwise turbulent ecosystem.
It’s why Tether is still the most traded digital asset on Earth, surpassing even Bitcoin in volume. And it’s why stablecoins — not next-gen chains — may hold the key to onboarding the next billion users.
The Next Web3 Revolution Will Be a Financial One
Here’s the kicker: while the crypto world obsesses over tech specs and new consensus models, most users — especially in emerging markets — don’t care how fast your blockchain is.
They care whether they can send, receive, and store value without worrying it’ll vanish overnight.
This is why stablecoins like Tether, USDC, and even CBDCs (despite their regulatory baggage) are gaining traction globally. They provide what no L1 can: confidence.
And as Quigley pointed out, stablecoins also solve real-world problems that crypto hasn’t fully addressed yet — like cross-border payments, settlement layers for traditional businesses, and access to financial systems in regions where banking infrastructure is limited or hostile.
“It’s crazy how many hands that transaction touches. And each of them, you know, a few pennies stick to their hands as they move the money along,” he said.
“And that’s why there is so much upside in having a single layer, which would be a blockchain layer, and a stablecoin as the unit of payment.”
Why The Industry Still Doesn’t Get It
The irony is that stablecoins are still often treated as a side dish to “real crypto.” But what Quigley emphasized — and what the industry needs to confront — is that they’re not auxiliary tools. They are the primary utility layer.
It’s not enough to have chains that do 100,000 TPS if the end user is still scared their money will be worth 10% less tomorrow. You can’t build a real economy on sand.
What Tether did — and what stablecoins continue to do — is pour concrete into the foundation of crypto. And without that foundation, none of the shiny dApps or DAOs or metaverse platforms matter.
Quigley’s message is clear: stop chasing raw speed and start building usable, dependable systems.
Final Thoughts: The Web3 Race Is Shifting Tracks
The next phase of crypto won’t be won by the fastest chain. It’ll be won by whoever builds systems that people actually trust — not just ideologically, but financially.
Tether was the first major breakthrough in that direction. And while it remains controversial in some regulatory corners, it has proven what works: predictability over volatility, stability over speed.
So if Web3 is going to truly scale — not just in transactions, but in users, businesses, and capital — then it’s time the industry asks itself a simple question:
Are we optimizing for what matters… or just what looks impressive?
Because the real winners of the next decade won’t be the ones with the fastest blocks. They’ll be the ones who built something people could rely on — day in, day out.
And that’s the kind of crypto that actually scales.
