The Past, Present, And Massive Future of Stablecoins (...Trillions Coming) - Stably CEO

**Robbie** (0:00)
Alrighty guys, welcome back to Stabled Up, episode number 26 We're gonna have Kory Hoang talk Stablecoin taxonomy today. Guys, let's get Kory up on the show, bring him in to Stabled Up, episode number 26, powered by our friends at Frax. Kory, welcome to the show, man.

**Kory Hoang** (0:17)
Hey guys, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a pleasure.

**Andy** (0:20)
Absolutely.

**Robbie** (0:21)
Of course, man.

**Andy** (0:22)
This is our Cornerstone Stabled Up show, all about the stablecoin economy. And you've got a stablecoin taxonomy that we are very, very curious to hear about, talk about and understand what went into this, how you're thinking about stablecoins. Before we do, Kory, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself, how you ended up as co-founder of Stably?

**Kory Hoang** (0:46)
Yeah, absolutely. So everyone, my name is Kory Hoang. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Stably. We've been building stablecoins at Stably for actually more than eight years now.
As for how I went down this rabbit hole, well, I guess I've always been fascinated by the concept of narrow banking, where banks act more like custodians with full reserve backings of customer deposits. However, the history of banking, as you guys know, has largely been a history of fractional reserve banking. We never truly experienced something that's as close to narrow banking as stablecoins until they finally came out. So, payment stablecoins are indeed the modern manifestation of a full reserve system. And that's where my original interest got really attached onto this technology. And back in 2018, we actually issued the fifth US dollar stablecoin in the world. It used to be called USDS. We listed on Binance, on Bitrex in early 2019 But within a few months of getting on Binance, we actually realized that we were, you know, now that we're on the big boys' playground, we had our first taste of a very fierce liquidity competition in what became known as the stablecoin war of 2019 Long story short, other stablecoin issuers, they were selling their tokens at a discount to market makers and disallowing these market makers to redeem them for several months. And then, you know, the bigger the discount they took, the longer that they had to wait to redeem. And so to realize these profits, market makers, you know, swap the tokens that they bought at a discount from these larger stablecoin issuers, and they swapped them into other stablecoins on Binance, like USDES from Stably, right? And then they proceeded to redeem the newly acquired stablecoin without any restriction from us, capturing arbitrage for themselves. And, you know, they were able to effectively reduce our reserve and circulating supply significantly. And, you know, this was basically our foray into the stablecoin war, right? This was the first one, started in 2019, and we very quickly realized that we were not sufficiently capitalized to pick a fight, heads on, with, you know, much larger stablecoin issuers, right? There was Circle, Paxos, Trust Token, you know, Gemini. They all raised way much more funding than we did. We only raised, like, you know, about a million dollars in funding during our first year. So, you know, therefore, we decided to pivot Stably in the beginning of 2020 and delist USDS from Binance. And we decided to pivot it to stablecoin infrastructure development and strategic advisory services. And basically taking what we have built and what we have learned to help other organizations launch their own stablecoin, their own brand of stablecoins, basically. We were one of the earliest industry pioneers of stablecoin as a service, or white labeling, as you know, as come to know. And we've been helping folks doing that ever since 2020 We work with many names like VeChain, Tezos, Stellar, Ripple. We advise Ripple initially during the development of RLUSD. So we have a little bit of our DNA everywhere.
But yeah, to date, Stably, we have supported over 20 Stablecoin launches, including one of the first GoBack tokens in 2021 And we also launched the first Stablecoin with interest rebates for borrowers back in 2024 Our clientele range from blockchain foundations to stablecoin protocols, to institutions, some gaming companies as well. Yeah, that's pretty much been my story since 2018

**Robbie** (4:26)
Yeah. Awesome, man. Man, that must have been a wild time with the fighting against the large issuers now, back in the earlier days before folks really understood what Stablecoins could be. I mean, I remember Rob trading on exchanges back in the day. There was no Stablecoin pairs. And then the Stablecoin pairs came about, and it was like a whole new way to trade on the markets. Folks were used to pricing things in Bitcoin terms. Now it was dollar terms. To be thinking about where these companies have came since then is pretty insane.