How many currencies will exist in 15 years?
- What keeps a currency alive
- Spheres of influence
- The vulnerable currencies
- The consolidation mechanism
- Issuing syndicates: the Starbucks dollar
- The clearinghouse as a US export
- The FX problem
- What this means
How many currencies do you think we're going to have in 10 years? Think about it for a second.
I think it's maybe — unfortunately, maybe fortunately, I don't know — but realistically, I think we're going to have something on the order of 10 or 15 that actually matter. That's a controversial perspective. But I think the logic is hard to escape.
What keeps a currency alive
Today there are roughly 180 currencies in the world. Most of them exist because governments require their use. You pay taxes in the local currency. Regulated businesses are required to accept it. Government employees are paid in it. These mandates create structural demand.
But what happens when every person on earth has a phone, a wallet, and the ability to instantly settle from one currency to another?
You can demand that taxes are paid in your local currency. You can demand that certain types of regulated businesses only accept a local currency. But we're also describing a world where you can instantly settle from one currency to another. And so you wouldn't really mind. This is how the stablecoin-backed Visa cards work today: if you're holding dollars and you swipe and pay in a local currency, the conversion happens instantly, invisibly.
The currency becomes a UX detail, not a financial commitment.
Spheres of influence
I think there's going to be a set of spheres of influence where the asset is valuable enough that the friction of managing tax considerations and managing local payments keeps people in their local currency. The US dollar, the euro, the Chinese yuan, the Japanese yen, perhaps the Brazilian real, the British pound, the Indian rupee — these are the currencies with enough economic mass to maintain their orbits.
These currencies survive because of gravity — the weight of the economies behind them, the depth of their financial markets, the institutional infrastructure built around them. If you live in the US, your mortgage is in dollars, your salary is in dollars, your taxes are in dollars. Switching to euros would create friction that outweighs any benefit.
The vulnerable currencies
But there's another set of countries where the value of being in a US dollar or being in a euro is too great. Where the local currency is inflationary, illiquid, or simply less trusted than available alternatives.
In these economies, citizens already dollarize informally. They save in dollars when they can. They price major transactions in dollars. The local currency is used for daily transactions only because there's no alternative.
Stablecoins remove that constraint. If you can hold USDC on your phone, earn yield on it, and spend it anywhere through instant conversion at the point of sale — why would you keep savings in a currency that loses 30% of its value every year?
The 900 million people living in high-inflation economies without access to a stable currency aren't waiting for a theoretical argument to resolve. They're already choosing the dollar, every chance they get. Stablecoins just make the choice easier.
The fragmentation is already visible in Latin America. Christian from Littio — a fintech operating across LatAm — describes a landscape where USDP is dominant on Tron, USDC is gaining power on Polygon, and new stablecoins like the SAT are launching in El Salvador. Each corridor, each chain, each country has different stablecoin preferences. This is what currency consolidation looks like in its early phase: messy, fragmented, and begging for infrastructure that can unify it.
The consolidation mechanism
Here's how I think it plays out:
Luis Videgaray — the former Mexican Foreign Minister, now at Affinity Partners — drew an analogy I keep coming back to. Stablecoins right now are like "making cars in 1910, when you have 350 companies." Twenty years after that, there were three companies in the US. The consolidation mechanism in auto manufacturing was scale economics and distribution networks. In stablecoins, the consolidation mechanism is fungibility infrastructure — the easier it is to swap between stablecoins, the fewer you actually need.
Phase 1 — Parallel usage: Stablecoins circulate alongside local currencies. People save in dollar stablecoins but spend in the local currency because merchants require it and taxes are denominated in it. This is already happening in Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, and elsewhere.
Phase 2 — Merchant acceptance: As stablecoin payment infrastructure improves, some merchants begin accepting dollar stablecoins directly. Why convert to a depreciating local currency when you can hold dollars? The government's mandate weakens at the edges.
Phase 3 — Wage denomination: Workers in the gig economy and international businesses start requesting payment in dollar stablecoins. Salaries denominated in local currency lose appeal relative to globally liquid alternatives.
Phase 4 — Local currency becomes the tax currency: The local currency still exists but primarily for tax payments and regulated transactions. Daily economic life increasingly happens in a G10 currency. The local currency is used the way most people use checks — technically available, rarely preferred.
Issuing syndicates: the Starbucks dollar
While currencies consolidate, the number of stablecoins may not. I don't think everyone is going to want to build front-to-back infrastructure totally bespoke for managing their own stablecoin. Instead, it'll be like the Starbucks dollar — Starbucks's rewards program is already issued by Fiserv. So the "Starbucks dollar" would be issued by Anchorage or one of a handful of infrastructure providers.
I expect we'll end up with many stablecoins issued by relatively fewer — but still more than five — issuing syndicates. From a regulatory perspective, no one wants more than 35% ownership by one company. But once you build fungibility between issuers, it becomes self-fulfilling: if it's easy to go from one to the other, you might as well add a sixth or seventh. The result is a system that looks like the GSIB structure — seven or so systemically important issuers, each with their own compliance stack, each competing on distribution and developer tools.
The clearinghouse as a US export
Every region that has stablecoins is going to need a clearinghouse so that people can move between stablecoins in their monetary policy region. And I'd like for that clearinghouse technology to come out of the US. There will probably be clearinghouses that need to run in the EU, India, Brazil — and there's no reason why it can't be US-built technology. Sort of like how Visa originated here and then became global infrastructure. The clearinghouse isn't just a domestic product. It's an exportable piece of financial infrastructure.
The FX problem
The flip side of currency consolidation is that the remaining currencies will need much deeper, more liquid foreign exchange markets. Right now, currency trading is extraordinarily competitive. Current spreads are tiny — you need to be deploying enormous amounts of capital to make money.
The amount of money you have to deploy is so large that you basically need to be sitting in a yield-bearing asset until the moment the money gets deployed. If you're a banker in London and your kids go to private school and you want to make a couple million dollars a year — well, how do you make a million dollars a year on a spread that's like one basis point on a given day? You've got to be deploying a billion dollars. You can't have a billion dollars sitting in a low-yield account.
There just aren't the lending facilities necessary right now on-chain to manage very large currency plays. The infrastructure for on-chain FX at institutional scale doesn't exist yet. But stablecoin clearinghouses could help — by creating deep, liquid pairs between stablecoin denominations. All the stablecoins in one currency are valued at a dollar, so you get natural liquidity aggregation. You'd rather trade against a basket of dollar stablecoins than a single pair.
What this means
If I'm right — if we go from 180 currencies to 10-15 that matter — the implications are enormous.
For monetary sovereignty: Smaller nations lose meaningful control over monetary policy. The impossible trinity becomes even more impossible when your citizens can exit your currency in seconds.
For remittances: The remittance corridor problem dissolves. If both sender and receiver hold the same stablecoin, there's nothing to remit. You just... send money.
For geopolitics: Dollar dominance intensifies in the short term, but a multipolar stablecoin world (dollar, euro, yuan stablecoins) could eventually create genuine currency competition that doesn't exist today.
For the people who live in these economies: Stability. Access to global commerce. Protection from local mismanagement. The same things that drove dollarization for decades, but without needing to physically hold cash in a mattress.
Fifteen currencies. Maybe fewer. The phone in everyone's pocket makes the argument for me.
Quotes
The prediction
Source: Sam Broner / Common Prefix — Jan 20, 2026
How many currencies do you all think we're going to have in 10 years? Everyone think about it for a second. I think it's maybe — unfortunately, maybe fortunately, I don't know — but realistically, I think we're going to have something on the order of like 10 or 15. And that's a controversial perspective I just shared.
What keeps a local currency alive
Source: Sam Broner / Common Prefix — Jan 20, 2026
How would you enforce that a local currency continues to get used? In 15 years everyone in the world has a cell phone. They all have a wallet. What you can demand is that taxes are paid in your local currency. And you can demand that certain types of regulated businesses only accept a local currency. But we're also describing a world where you can instantly settle from one currency to another. And so you wouldn't really mind. This is how the stablecoin-backed Visa cards work. If you're holding them in dollars and you swipe and you pay in a local currency.
Spheres of influence vs. the vulnerable
Source: Sam Broner / Common Prefix — Jan 20, 2026
I think there's going to be a set of spheres of influence where the asset is valuable enough that the friction of managing tax considerations and managing how do I pay at this place will keep people in their local currency. But there's another set of countries where the value of being in a US dollar or being in a euro or being in — trying to think, maybe even like a real, the Brazilian currency — is too great, and you would just rather be in that currency, even if it adds a little bit of friction and you're mostly saving and spending at least thinking in dollars or some sort of, let's call it a G10 currency.
The euro stablecoin opportunity
Source: Sam Broner / Common Prefix — Jan 20, 2026
I think that euro stablecoins make a lot of sense. Banks in Europe are using the same infrastructure that banks in the US are, and having global reach to your stablecoins is very good for everyone. Ideal would be that our clearinghouse actually makes it easier to go from one currency to another because you've got a deep liquid pair to any of the stablecoins, because all the stablecoins in one currency, you know, are valued at a dollar.
Why on-chain FX isn't ready yet
Source: Sam Broner / Common Prefix — Jan 20, 2026
Currently very hard to make money currency trading. You need to be deploying enormous amounts of capital. The amount of money you have to deploy is so large that you basically need to be sitting in a yield-bearing asset until the moment the money gets deployed. Because — let's just imagine you're a banker in London, and your kids go to private school and you want to make a couple million dollars a year. This is your goal. Well, how do you make a million dollars a year on a spread that's like one basis point on a given day? You've got to be deploying, like, a billion dollars. Just practically. This is the way the world works, and you can't have a billion dollars sitting in a low-yield account. And so there just isn't the kind of lending facilities necessary right now on chain to manage very large currency plays.
5-7 issuing syndicates, not thousands
Source: Zoom: The Better Money Company / Affinity — Jan 9, 2026
Sam: I would be very surprised if we ended up with fewer than five stablecoin issuers for the same reason that we have seven GSIBs — seven systemically important banks. It just is against the interest of the US to have one private issuer own a large part of how money works. I think from a regulatory perspective, don't want more than 35% ownership by one company. You could end up with three to five, but once you start to build fungibility between issuers, it's sort of self-fulfilling. If it's easy to go from one to the other, then you might as well add a sixth or seventh.
I don't think everyone's going to want to have their front-to-back infrastructure totally bespoke for managing their own stablecoin. Instead, it'll be like the Starbucks dollar — Starbucks's rewards program is already issued by Fiserv — so the Starbucks dollar issued by Anchorage or something. I do think we're going to have many stablecoins issued by relatively fewer, but still more than five, issuing syndicates.
The 1910 auto industry analogy
Source: Zoom: The Better Money Company / Affinity — Jan 9, 2026
Luis (Affinity): It feels like stablecoins right now — making cars in 1910, when you have 350 companies. Twenty years after that, there were three companies in the US. So do you see that evolution, or is there going to be consolidation, or do you envision — perhaps enabled by things like what you're doing — a future like a steady state where you have this multiplicity of stablecoins?
Clearinghouse technology as US export
Source: Zoom: Better Money Co. / Affinity — Dec 12, 2025
Sam: I think stablecoins are a good thing. I'm very pro-dollarization. Ultimately, every stablecoin, every region that has a stablecoin is going to need a clearinghouse so that people can move between stablecoins in their monetary policy region. And I would like for the clearinghouse technology to come out of the US. There's probably going to be clearinghouses that need to be run in the EU, India, Brazil, and I see no reason why it can't be the Better Money Company clearinghouse technology. It'd be great if that — sort of like Visa originated here.
LatAm stablecoin fragmentation
Source: Sam Broner and Christian Knudsen, Co-founder & CEO Littio — Jan 14, 2026
Christian (Littio): In LatAm it's not just one stablecoin that's strong. For example, USDP is super strong. But as well in Tron. In Polygon as well, USDC is getting a lot of power because obviously from the US. Right now, Terra is launching the SAT, which is like the new stablecoin — they're going to launch in El Salvador.