Why Hold a Dollar?

The Stablecoin Inherits the Dollar's Weaknesses

When we published The Future of Crypto Wallets: A Pocket Full of Asset-Backed Tokens & Death to Fiat in November 2023, the central claim drew the most skepticism: that the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) would, over time, erode the case for holding fiat currency at all. The conventional rebuttal was that stablecoins had "solved" crypto's store-of-value problem — a dollar on-chain is still a dollar, so why reach for anything more exotic? This update takes that rebuttal head-on.

A dollar-pegged stablecoin is an elegant payment instrument and, with the GENIUS Act now law, an increasingly well-regulated one. But as a store of value, it is a faithful mirror of the currency it tracks. Hold $10,000 of USDC for three years and you still have $10,000 — and that is precisely the problem. Measured by the government's own Consumer Price Index, the dollar lost roughly 6% of its purchasing power between 2023 and the end of 2025, and with inflation running near 4.2% year-over-year as of May 2026, the cumulative erosion since our 2023 piece is now on the order of 10%.²

And CPI flatters the picture. As our June 2026 macro note Gold, the Dollar, and the Debt: A Tangled Affair argued, the more honest yardstick is not a basket of consumer goods but the assets that cannot be printed.³ By that measure the dollar's decline is far steeper than 10%.

A dollar-pegged token is stable the way a boat tied to a sinking pier is stable. It moves perfectly with its anchor — and the anchor is going down.

Read the Dollar Against Things That Can't Be Printed

The clearest evidence that fiat is losing the store-of-value contest is the repricing of hard assets since late 2023.

*Gold reached an all-time high of ~$5,589/oz in January 2026 before correcting; even after that, it is roughly double its Nov-2023 level. **Auto premiums surged ~46% from 2022–24 before easing ~6% in 2025; net change remains sharply positive. Sources: RWA.xyz, BLS, Insurify, CNBC, EIA.^1,2,4,5

Gold is the headline: more than doubling at its January 2026 peak and still up roughly 106% from November 2023.⁴ Insurance — the cost of simply protecting what you already own — has compounded relentlessly, with homeowners premiums rising for 26 consecutive quarters.² The lone soft spot is energy: WTI crude is actually down versus 2023.⁵ We flag that honestly — and it makes the core point rather than undercutting it. No single asset is a perfect hedge. A basket of tokenized real assets — metals, income-producing property, diversified private credit — smooths those idiosyncrasies while keeping you out of a depreciating currency.

What the Wallet Can Now Hold

The store-of-value argument used to fail on a practical point: you couldn't actually put these assets in a wallet. That has changed. The tokenized-RWA market reached ~$31 billion by mid-2026, and it is concentrated, tellingly, in the categories that hold value: tokenized U.S. Treasuries surpassed $15 billion (BlackRock's BUIDL fund alone holding ~$2.4 billion and yielding ~4.5–5%), tokenized commodities — almost entirely gold — passed $7 billion, and on-chain private credit reached roughly $5 billion.^1,6

Private credit deserves emphasis. As we argued in Private Money Is Sexy Again, the retreat of bank balance sheets has pushed yield into private hands — and tokenization is what finally makes that yield divisible, transferable, and holdable in the same wallet as everything else.⁷ A tokenized senior loan position throwing off low-double-digit yield is not just a better store of value than a 0%-real stablecoin; it is an income-producing one.

From Store of Value to Means of Payment

The remaining objection is liquidity at the register: a store of value is only useful if you can spend it. That gap is closing faster than even we expected. On March 30, 2026, Block began rolling out Bitcoin payments across Square, auto-enabling acceptance for eligible U.S. sellers over its Lightning Network, with processing fees waived through 2026.⁸ Merchants can settle instantly to dollars if they choose, but the consumer experience is the milestone: tens of millions of everyday point-of-sale terminals are becoming crypto-aware by default.

Bitcoin is the on-ramp; the logical next step is asset-backed tokens themselves moving through the same rails. Once a point-of-sale terminal can debit a Lightning or stablecoin payment, it is a software change — not an infrastructure one — to let a shopper settle a coffee from a tokenized money-market share or a fractional gold token, converting only the few dollars needed at the moment of sale. The holder keeps savings in an appreciating asset until the instant of purchase. That is the inversion of today's model, in which you must hold the depreciating asset (cash) in advance of spending it.

The endgame isn't "spend your Bitcoin." It's: keep your wealth in things that hold value, and let the rails convert the exact sliver you need, the instant you need it.

The Honest Caveats

This is a thesis, not a victory lap. Three risks remain real. Volatility cuts both ways — gold corrected ~25% from its January 2026 high, and asset-backed tokens carry the price risk of their underlying. Security and custody remain the most underappreciated dangers: most wallets are still "hot," and on-chain finality means errors are often irreversible. And liquidity outside Treasuries and gold can be thin, so the "convert at the point of sale" vision depends on secondary markets that are still maturing. None of these refute the core argument; they define the engineering and regulatory work still ahead.

So What's Next?

Our 2023 thesis was that real-world value would migrate on-chain and that fiat's monopoly as a store of value would weaken. Three years on, the dollar has lost roughly a tenth of its official purchasing power and far more against hard assets; gold has doubled; the cost of merely insuring your possessions has compounded; the tokenized-RWA market has grown fivefold; and the largest payments network in American small business now accepts Bitcoin by default. The pieces are assembling.

The question we opened with is no longer rhetorical. As wallets fill with tokenized claims on assets that hold their value — and as those same wallets learn to spend at any register — the rational long-term holder's default may flip. Not "why hold an asset-backed token instead of a dollar," but the reverse: why hold the dollar at all?