Stablecoins are disruptive, but who will be the disruptors?
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This is a segment from the Blockworks Daily newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. “Leaders get killed from below.” — Clay Christensen In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation — when a product that initially looks like a cheap knockoff ends up rewriting the rules of an entire industry. These products typically get their start in either low-end or entirely new markets that incumbents have ignored because they were either not profitable enough to serve or didn’t seem strategically important. But that turns out to be a good starting point: “A disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market,” Christensen explained. These customers are often eager to adopt a product that is initially inferior in terms of traditional performance metrics, but cheaper, simpler and more accessible to them. Christensen cites the example of Toyota, which got its start in the US market by targeting budget-conscious customers that the Big Three US automakers had overlooked. The incumbents’ focus on bigger, faster, more feature-rich cars had created “a vacuum underneath them,” in Christensen’s telling, and Toyota filled that vacuum with the slower, smaller, no-frills Corona, which cost just $2,000 when it was introduced in 1965. Today, Toyota is the second-largest automaker in the US — and its Lexus LX 600 Luxury SUV starts at $115,850. Toyota used the Corona to wedge its way into the US market and then steadily climbed the value chain, proving Christensen’s thesis that the best way to the top is to start from the bottom. Stablecoins may be on a similar trajectory. Disruption is coming Christensen’s disruptors started in niche markets — and stablecoins started in emerging ones. For people in the United States with access to bank deposits, stablecoins are essentially an inferior kind of dollar —…
Filed under: News - @ May 12, 2025 10:22 pm