Nic Carter on Dai

Bank deposit-backed stablecoins will win (and have already won) simply because they're more capital efficient, and that trumps everything.

You can get censor-resistance lite from a network of shadow banks willing to back stablecoins. As long as there's some bank worldwide willing to facilitate the issuance of these things, they will exist.

Even the decentralized™ stablecoins like Dai/Sai clearly have an issuer/administrator . . . so it's not clear that they're any more able to resist coercion than, say, an overseas bank in some tax haven somewhere.

There's a reason there's $4.5b worth of Tether outstanding, $450m of USDC, and only ~$100m worth of Dai. It costs >$1.5 to create $1 of Dai, and it costs ~$1 to create $1 of USDT/USDC. The economics is persuasive.

Consider that banks issuing unaccountable stablecoins might converge, censor-resistance-wise, to administrators of crypto-backed stablecoin systems (which do exist).

In that case, the bank-issued coins are cheaper.

Bank deposit-backed stablecoins will win (and have already won) simply because they're more capital efficient, and that trumps everything....To be fair I think there’s a big chance something like Dai is able to retain its true censor resistant characteristics and so remains differentiated, but I think it’s likely to stay somewhat niche.

Maker and Dai. Dai users return capital to MKR owners through the burn mechanism. At this point, the value of MKR (the derivative) is about 18x the value of Dai (the underlying). Channelling my best Matt Levine here: "This seems... wrong."