Commercial interest is nothing new. Tech-savvy American corporates have long recognised stablecoins as the one species of digital money with a compelling mainstream use. The first generation of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin offered not just a way of digitally storing and transferring value, but the ability to denominate it in their own standard units. That model caught on with speculative traders but never made much headway in the world of digital payments. Stablecoins, by contrast, combine the novelty of global, real-time availability and programmability with the familiarity of national currency units. That makes them uninteresting as speculative bets – but well suited as methods for payment.