‘We’re on the cusp of more widespread adoption’: Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sector’s emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the conversation.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in crypto’s evolution?
Yeah, I would say we’re probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don’t know if people will love that term, but that’s probably a pretty accurate description.
For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say.
I think there’s going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We’re seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don’t trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don’t actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don’t also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins.
For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like?
Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . .
Here’s a really simple example: There’s a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don’t have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them.
One of the women was in an abusive marriage and saved up the Bitcoin and then used that to eventually divorce her husband, so that gives you some kind of agency. I have some close Turkish friends, and I think it was in 2018, the value of the lira was just going down and down. So it’s like people in those places I think grasp these kinds of things a lot more quickly, like the value of crypto. Having a form of money that isn’t influenced by a central bank, that’s stablecoins.
Because the stablecoins are generally linked to the U.S. dollar, it’s a way to sort of have dollars without having dollars, right?
Exactly.
I mean, you’re getting the stability of that U.S. market, which there’s some irony in that, because of course one of the philosophical ideas around crypto is that it’s not linked to a government, that it’s separate.
Now we’re going to get really deep into this. So you’re correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don’t otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that’s kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off.
A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don’t really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that’s where the interest in stablecoins came about. There’s a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it’s of course because we’re the global reserve currency, so there’s a lot of safety there.
Trump seems like he’s done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He’s launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump’s crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets?
I don’t think there’s a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump’s MO is. But let’s just say he’s president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they’re business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you’re basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was.
Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so of course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. Just note the timing there and put those two facts together and you can make your own conclusions, but, well, let me put it this way: Trump saw that the Biden administration alienated the crypto community. He realized these people have money and they hate the Democrats. . . . He said, “I’m the crypto candidate,” and he even went to the Bitcoin conference last year. He made all these promises to the crypto community and Bitcoin communities.
On top of that, people in his personal orbit, his family, realized this industry is going to get bigger, this industry’s all about money, and so they have been taking advantage. So you will see, and this is very interesting, there were a number of people who were very passionately pro-Trump during the campaign, and then once the memecoin thing happened, because not only Trump, but also Melania launched a memecoin, and they were not happy about what he was doing.
It was reported that their company, World Liberty Financial, was doing deals with different token teams where basically they were just exchanging money. “I’ll give you this amount of money if you buy the World Liberty Financial token, and we’ll buy this amount of your token. I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” But people in the industry also kind of look down on that, because it’s not organic.