The ‘Killer App’ of the Crypto World
After leaving my role in TV advertising sales, I took three months off work. It was a miserable time. So, after just a few weeks, I began job hunting and landed a position at a startup offering ‘smart contracts’ secured in a ‘digital ledger’ to automate billing and invoicing between parties. As long as there was data confirming a transaction, the software handled the rest. This ‘digital ledger’ was trustworthy because it was secured by a blockchain—an unbreakable, immutable record of events. The smart contract encoded the business logic, ensuring accurate execution and outcome management.
The promise was compelling, and in theory, the technology worked and had transformative potential. However, the company failed, and I found myself unemployed. Shortly thereafter, the crypto winter set in. Although I secured another job at a similarly positioned company, the grand promise of the first wave of blockchain technology largely fizzled. ‘Non-fungible tokens’ representing art that once sold for millions now fetch only hundreds, if they sell at all. Such is the peril of advanced technology in its early stages. Software isn’t for the weak-willed, shallow-pocketed, or foolish.
Yet, blockchain technology is real. The world needs distributed ledgers, and Bitcoin isn’t the only viable use case. It appears that the first real blockchain asset gaining acceptance is an asset called a stablecoin, which is worth a short review.
A stablecoin is a specialized form of cryptocurrency whose value is intentionally tied to a stable asset—most commonly the U.S. dollar, or occasionally commodities like gold. Unlike more volatile coins such as Bitcoin, stablecoins maintain their peg through one of three mechanisms: backing by fiat reserves, collateralization with other cryptocurrencies, or algorithmic supply adjustments. Fiat-backed stablecoins make up over 90% of the total stablecoin supply.
In essence, stablecoins function as digital representations of trusted assets housed on an immutable ledger. This design significantly reduces price fluctuations, making stablecoins far more suitable for everyday uses—such as payments, remittances, or serving as a bridge between traditional finance and the crypto world.
So, while my employers were trying to do something complicated with blockchain, stablecoins are just a sort of digital dollar or dollar backed asset. Easy to understand, and as such, easier to start using.
Stablecoins are our first real shot at doing for money what email did for communication: Make it open, instant, and borderless.
Before apps like WhatsApp, sending a text across borders meant paying 30 cents per message. Internet-native messaging is now instant, global, and free. Payments are now where messaging was in 2008: limited by borders, burned by intermediaries, and expensive by design. Stablecoins could dramatically improve this situation.
Today international remittances can cost up to 10% in fees. (A $200 remittance cost 6.62% on average in September 2024.) These remittance fees aren’t just friction points — they’re effectively regressive taxes on the world’s poorest workers. But businesses also suffer from the inefficiencies of global payments. Along certain corridors, B2B payments can take 3-to-7 days to clear and can cost anywhere from $14-to-$150 per $1,000 transacted — passing through as many as five intermediaries along the way, each of whom takes a cut. Stablecoins could help bypass legacy systems and silos, like the international SWIFT network and associated clearing and settlement processes, and make these transactions nearly free and instant.
In practice, stablecoins allow parties to make payments via blockchain ledgers with virtually no intermediaries, enabling instantaneous transfers at minimal cost. For example, if SpaceX owes a supplier, it can simply transfer a widely accepted stablecoin to the supplier’s ledger. The supplier then chooses to convert it to dollars or hold the stablecoin, knowing its value remains stable as long as the underlying asset does. In fact, SpaceX is already accepting payments from countries with volatile currencies in stablecoins, which are resistant to fraud and devaluation.
Who else could benefit from this innovation? A16z again:
Walmart made $648 billion in annual revenue with $15.5 billion in profit. They might pay about $10 billion in credit card fees. Eliminating payment fees, Walmart’s profitability, controlling for all other factors, could increase by over 60%, just through cheaper payment solutions.
Chipotle, a quick-service restaurant, made $9.8 billion in annual revenue. It might pay $148 million in credit card fees on a $1.2 billion annual profit. Chipotle could increase profitability by 12% just by reducing payment processing fees.
Kroger, a national grocery store, has the most to gain because it has the lowest margins — and, astonishingly, Kroger’s net income and cost of payments may be almost equal. Like many grocers, its margins are below 2%. Kroger could potentially double profits with stablecoin payments.
Note retailers and payment processors are not at odds here; they’re aligned against high-fee payment solutions. Payment processors are also low-margin businesses, giving up most of their margin to card networks and issuing banks. So when payment processors handle a transaction, most of their fee passes through to payment networks. When Stripe handles an online retail checkout flow, they take 2.9% of the total transaction and a $0.30 fee, but they give Visa and the issuing bank more than 70% of that fee.
The revenue payment processors make on stablecoin transactions — with lower fees and no network gatekeeper to pay — is therefore much higher-margin. The first shoe has already dropped: Stripe announced that they are taking a 1.5% fee on stablecoin payments, an over 50% discount on the fees they charge for card payments. To support this effort, Stripe acquired Bridge.xyz (a payments platform built with stablecoins), its largest acquisition to date.
Stablecoins aren’t yet a complete solution. While they’re used for large money transfers, small retailers—like coffee shops—haven’t adopted them yet. Yet they stand to gain significantly by escaping the credit card networks. For a small purchase, credit cards are often just a convenience: you don’t need borrowed money to buy a coffee, and you don’t require fraud protection when the transaction is face-to-face. You simply want to avoid handling cash. If stablecoins can transfer value instantly, cheaply, and directly on a ledger, they could replace credit-card networks tied to banks.
After faster payments comes the next stage which will be more like what I was promising at my old employer: programmable money:
As we’ve covered above, stablecoins stand to revolutionize the whole financial intermediation stack. Yet in prioritizing the functional benefits of stablecoins — low-hanging use cases with clear friction points, such as international payments — many centralized stablecoins still rely on existing legacy systems for reserving and monetary creation. This includes all of those systems’ entrenched inefficiencies and vulnerabilities.
Decentralized stablecoins — which are typically programmed to maintain the price peg via algorithms — can do better. In general, decentralized finance (DeFi), offers a number of advantages over traditional financial frameworks:
- Enhanced resilience: By distributing issuance across a decentralized network, decentralized stablecoins reduce single points of failure, mitigating system risk.
- Improved transparency: The ability to have real-time, onchain visibility of the asset reserves backing stablecoins in issuance allows for better oversight by system designers, market participants, and regulators.
- Increased efficiency: The modularity and programmability inherent in DeFi enable improved capital efficiency and specialization, countering the traditional trend toward centralized profit capture.
- Future proofing: As digitally native financial instruments, decentralized stablecoins are better suited than outdated bank APIs for seamlessly developing and launching consumer financial applications.
The real flaw in my former employer’s model was their aim to, as they put it, “digitize real-world assets,” while stablecoins effectively digitize assets that are already abstract—like the dollar. After all, dollars are a concept, so creating a digital representation of them is far easier to accept. In contrast, digitally tokenizing something tangible—say, a house—and trading it on a blockchain will take considerably more time to implement. But I believe we’ll get there eventually.
the full article is here: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/stablecoin-guide-what-why-how/
In another interview at a16z, Chris Dixon went into detail about how technology follows a path from what he calls “skeuomorphic” to truly AI-native applications. The skeuomorphic phase typically involves using new technology to replicate existing ones—such as turning a newspaper into a digital version during the early days of the internet, rather than redesigning the experience entirely. Another example he gave was early photography: the first photographs were simply portraits of people sitting still, functionally replacing painted portraits. But eventually, photography evolved into something that painting never could—namely films. Movies are sequences of photographs arranged to tell a story. Today, Hollywood continues to retell these stories in new and innovative ways, but now we’re entering a new phase in film, thanks to technologies that are transforming our culture.
The Summer Blockbuster Movie As A Senior Citizen
I recently watched The Deer Hunter again, and it resonates as powerfully now as it did when I first saw it in the theater. I vividly recall that experience—I remember the theater, and roughly where I sat. I was 16 at the time, and I don’t even remember how I managed to get into an R-rated film. I probably bought a ticket to something else and slipped in. But the experience of going—by myself, a habit I picked up early—has stayed with me.
I mention this anecdote because both movies and the moviegoing experience are changing. We’re arguably at the end of an era—the traditional theatrical lifespan of films, as we’ve known it, may be fading. And that shift is worth paying attention to. After all, it was the theater business that gave us, over the past 50 years, the concept of the summer blockbuster.
I saw Jaws with my parents, and we stood in a long line for the first time to see a movie. I remember it vividly—as do millions of others. We bought our tickets, then queued outside in a line that wrapped around the building. I’d never seen anything like it. I wasn’t sure we’d all get in, but of course, we did. I saw Jaws in a packed house, and it was electrifying. I went back at least once more. It was a true cultural phenomenon—the first real summer blockbuster.
One of the venerated ‘trades,’ Variety, has the story:
Despite its chaotic creation, “Jaws” became the highest-grossing movie in history, earning a staggering $260.7 million in its initial release. Fifty years later, we’re still living in the entertainment landscape that “Jaws” reshaped. Its outsize success made studios realize that if they packaged and promoted movies correctly, they wouldn’t just be hits — they could become phenomena, selling T-shirts and toys along with tickets. “Jaws” established the template for “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Avengers” and the other culture-defining smashes that followed in its wake.
Over the years, the lore surrounding the creation of Jaws has grown, repeated, and mythologized. In essence, the challenges of shooting on open water overwhelmed both crew and actors—and then there was the shark. The mechanical shark was a colossal contraption that, by today’s CGI standards, would have lived digitally—but back then, it had to operate in real water. It looked terrible, it sank at least once, and managing it for the film was nearly impossible.
So, as the story goes, these setbacks were turned into strengths by not showing the shark often. Spielberg leaned into suspense: the camera became the shark’s point of view, and John Williams’s score signaled its presence—creating tension far greater than any full reveal could have:
“Jaws” is a masterpiece, rivaling “Psycho” in its use of editing, music and camera angles to establish tension and suspense. The film works because it taps into familiar anxieties. Who hasn’t felt suddenly paranoid about all the creatures lurking beneath the waves? But the irresistible force of Spielberg’s vision and ambition allowed him not only to finish “Jaws,” but to create something far greater than the sum of its potboiler parts.
It didn’t take long for marketers to recognize that they had discovered something far more powerful than prestige films—they were sitting on a phenomenon. They also realized that the massive Baby Boomer generation was a prime target audience. Those kids—kids like me—were out of school during the summer, making summertime releases perfect for younger audiences. Remember: Jaws premiered just three years after The Godfather won Best Picture. Two years later, the summer would be dominated by Star Wars, while films like The Godfather were relegated to the fall “Oscar season.”
Suddenly Universal was inspired to back the picture with a massive (for its time) $1.8 million promotional blitz, one that revolutionized how movies were marketed and released. It started with the decision to debut the film on June 20, 1975. Nowadays, summer is the most popular time for moviegoing, but before “Jaws,” studios hadn’t yet become obsessed with that season. Many of the biggest films — including “The Godfather,” “Love Story” and “The Exorcist” — premiered in the spring or winter. But those were aimed at adults; “Jaws” wanted to attract teenagers along with their parents, so it helped to debut the film when school was out. The film’s huge gross illustrated the commercial power of this younger audience. It was a lesson Hollywood would never forget.
It is 50 years past that summer now, and the summer blockbuster has been a part of the past 50 years and given us some trash, and some classics. One of my favorite films was a summer blockbuster, released in July of 1986. Aliens was a classic just a few minutes in, and it made Sigourney Weaver a star. It was the summer blockbuster that lifted Arnold Schwarzenegger out of obscurity. The summer and the Christmas season has given the movie theater business a reason to expand and become the ‘multiplex,’ either as part of a mall or a free standing complex.
And those days are coming to an end. Both the theatrical movie, which clocks in at around 100 minutes, and the movie theater itself as a destination, are now time limited. The whole art form of the feature is at an end. The trends are everywhere.
Read the Variety report here: https://variety.com/2025/film/features/jaws-50th-anniversary-steven-spielberg-summer-blockbuster-1236436040/
Stuck In A Moment We Can’t Get Out Of
Jaws was an incredible money‑maker, and so, of course, the industry came back for another bite with Jaws 2. The first film—like many before it—helped kick off the trend of producing sequels. Star Wars arrived in 1977 and accelerated that trend even further. Today, sequels, remakes, reboots, and prequels dominate both the movie theaters and even the radio.
As Ted Gioia points at at the Honest Broker:
Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped. Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas—remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.
He goes on to point out that the same trend can be seen in the music business where 80% of the music streamed is much older where just 25 years ago, 80% of the music on the radio was new.
In movies, in music, and surely in publishing, we are in a loop. New aren’t selling or not being created at all. Gioia blames the leadership in these industries:
No, you can’t blame the audience. They started losing interest in brand extensions a long time ago. The studios just didn’t want to believe it. And you certainly can’t blame the artists. They only can make movies that get funded by the studios—and the studios only want to spend money on brand franchises. The reality is that the system is broken. The honchos who run the culture and entertainment businesses made this mess. They created the ugly 80% rule by reheating leftovers—again and again and again.
I disagree with him here. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but the real problem is cultural. We’ve “pushed the boundaries” so far that there’s no longer any legitimate space left to explore. All that remains are the margins—porn, gangsta rap, and other fringe expressions that have moved to the center of the culture as the older art forms fade. Culturally, we are, at least for now, intellectually bankrupt. The audience, the stars, and the executives are leading each other in circles. No wonder their politics are so uniform.
It won’t stay this way. New cultural forms and patterns will emerge soon enough—but I have no idea, none at all, what they’ll look like. I probably won’t be able to participate in them. My norms, tastes, and memories were forged in another era. Still, maybe I’ll see it coming. Maybe I’ll at least be able to appreciate these new forms as they rise.
We’ll see. For now, I’m simply grateful that I got to see great films in beautiful theaters and form fond memories along the way. I worked in movies, made music, and built friendships there. It was wonderful—but it was never going to last forever. The movie musical died, and that was okay. New creations must feast on the ashes of the past.
Music
When I left TV, I went into software because I could see it was, as Marc Andreessen has noted, eating everything. But, as noted, software is hard work and most of it won’t work as promised and those companies will fail.
Still, technology is driving us to a future that is shaping up right in front of our eyes, and these changes will drive our currently stuck culture to new places eventually. In the meantime, there is a band that was hitting its peak at the same time the movies were peaking in creativity, U2, with a perspective:
You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it
Oh love, look at you now
You’ve got yourself stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it
TomRoushOnline 