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In the crypto world, Bitcoin is perceived as slow to change, clunky technologically, and as having bad governance. While all these things may be true, Bitcoin has strong network effects that will maintain its status as the primary value store in the short to medium term.

Late last year, USV invested in Numerai, a hedge fund that uses data scientists all around the world to “crowdsource” stock price predictions. I blogged a bit about Numerai then.

If that business model wasn’t cutting-edge enough for you, the Numerai team has now gone a step further and issued a crypto-token called Numeraire to incent these data scientists to work together to build the best models instead of just competing with each other.

To be clear, I don’t think Steem has this all figured out. I don’t own any Steem (or at least I don’t think I do). And I think they have made things a bit too complicated with their tokens and incentives. To their credit, they have taken steps to simplify things, and they are headed in the right direction.

Ethereum has enormous developer interest and the second-largest market cap. It also has characteristics that could make it a good payment network. At a minimum, Ethereum is a likely "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold" status. There are some scenarios where Bitcoin collapses and Ethereum takes over as primary value store.

Over $20 trillion is believed to be stored in the Cayman Islands and in Swiss bank accounts. These offshore accounts are used due to their discretion and privacy. Digital privacy tokens like Monero and Zcash will subsume this use case over time.

We are also seeing signs that users like using crypto-assets in mobile and web apps. Kin, built by our portfolio company Kik, has become one of the most used cryptocurrencies in the world.

Bitcoin is the one protocol that has found lasting product-market fit. In terms of a censorship proof digital store of wealth, there is nothing that comes close to Bitcoin. There are some protocols, like the privacy-focused ones, that offer similar and in some cases better use cases. But for the most part, Bitcoin is our digital gold.

To me it all goes back to the internet—what does the internet want to be and it wants a currency. It’s always wanted a currency, it just hasn’t had the technology until ten years ago [in the form of Bitcoin]. [Now it has] something that is uniform, has the right principles behind it, and has a lot of people who are passionate enough to make all these sacrifices to [Bitcoin] for a greater good beyond themselves.

Crypto dollars, like other crypto assets, ride on crypto rails. I can send my crypto dollars from my Coinbase wallet to your Coinbase wallet, your Ledger wallet, or many other crypto wallets.

USDC is built on Ethereum and is an ERC-20 token. So it uses crypto standards to ride on these crypto rails.

But more than all of that, USDC are programmable dollars. This is a big deal. Kind of like the difference between an MP3 file and song on a cassette tape. Once an asset is natively digital, without any strings attached, and can be programmed and routed digitally, interesting things happen.

If you have cash balances in your Coinbase account, consider using at least some of them to buy USDC. Then send them around to friends and family. It will feel like using Venmo today. But that is just the start of a lot more to come once programmers start building apps that accept USDC and other crypto assets.