Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

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But that relegates the centralized exchange into the position of being nothing more than a "fiat on-ramp", and potentially literally nothing more than a trivial wrapper around Circle (in the case of Coinbase and USDC), which effectively undermines their business model of operating the whole exchange apparatus. (Hell: does Coinbase even make any money at all if you deposit USD and withdraw USDC? I think they don't have deposit fees in general, do the USD<>USDC 1:1, and then offer free withdrawals on USDC due to some fancy new "gasless" withdrawal mechanism Circle came up with.)

Regardless, the point being made in the comment upthread wasn't "you will never need a centralized entity ever again": that was a total strawman. It wasn't even that you wouldn't want any centralized exchanges! It was merely that the "long tail" of random exchanges who specialize in listing more random tokens is effectively dead as who would bother with all that trouble to navigate all the red tape--particularly to operate in the United States--to support and vet these tokens when every token ever can be made available on a decentralized exchange. You might thereby still want a handful of the largest exchanges... but do you really need Bittrex enough for them to make enough money to put much effort into existing?

    But that relegates the centralized exchange into the position of being nothing more than a "fiat on-ramp"

That's actually a pretty profitable business. "If you want to interact in any way with crypto, you either have to go through Coinbase or some shady black market crypto dealer," is actually great news for Coinbase.

I mean, you cut off the rest of that paragraph ;P. Sure: it sounds like maybe a reasonable opportunity for Circle, but Coinbase would effectively be adding no value anymore and would have to attempt to charge (a lot, if they wanted to have any hope of making anywhere near as much money as their current business model) for something that not only are they currently doing for free but which they aren't really doing in the first place (as they are just a thin wrapper around Circle). The only reason Circle isn't bothering with this market is seemingly that they didn't want to deal directly with retail and they don't really have to because Coinbase was willing to integrate it for free... but like, Paxos (which is also regulated) does deal with individual users, so there is no reason Circle can't in a world where Coinbase is otherwise irrelevant. (The reality, though, is that there is still benefit for traders to having centralized exchanges due to their limit order book model, so I wouldn't discount Coinbase just yet, anyway ;P.)

    The only reason Circle isn't bothering with this market is seemingly that they didn't want to deal directly with retail

That's actually a really good reason! An analogous situation is with e.g. Robinhood and Citadel. In one sense Robinhood is "just" a retail onramp. All their trades go through Citadel. So in theory Citadel could, at any moment, just cut off Robinhood by allowing retail investors to trade directly with them.

But I'm willing to bet that they won't, because dealing with retail investors is a hassle. You have to have customer service. You have to deal with additional regulation. You have to deal with random social media firestorms. It's a mess. I don't blame Citadel for leaving it to Robinhood to deal with these issues and I wouldn't blame Circle for leaving it to Coinbase to deal with the retail issues surrounding crypto.

> does Coinbase even make any money at all if you deposit USD and withdraw USDC?

They have 75% of $33 billions (with a 'b') of the USDC circulating as short-term US treasuries (with every single individual ID of the short-term treasuries publicly posted).

So someone is basically printing free money by having about $25 bn in short term US treasuries yielding atm something insane like 4% yearly.

I don't know who's pocketing that money but that's about $1 billion, yearly, in yields from the short term US treasuries.

If somehow Coinbase (or "Centre" but Centre is Circle + Coinbase) is pocketing that money, they probably could allow 0% fees trading everywhere and still be one of the most profitable HN unicorn out there.

Does Coinbase give APY on people keeping USDC at Coinbase? I have no idea. Does Coinbase give APY on people withdrawing USDC to private wallets? I think they don't. I'm nearly sure they don't.

What happens to that money?

I've never seen anything posted on the subject.

Coinbase does provide interest on balances held in USDC. But no, if you withdraw it to your own wallet that does not happen.

FWIW, I specifically chose to say "Coinbase" as my mental model here is that Coinbase is an exchange and Circle issues the stablecoin and maybe Coinbase has a deal to get interest from Circle for all the USDC held by Coinbase and maybe even is given some kind of kickback for deposits and withdrawals, but that doesn't really mean much for the business model of running an exchange: Circle directly provides fiat on-ramp services to companies and could to individuals as well (given that their competitor Paxos supports both kinds of user).

FWIW, my defense of Coinbase in specific is that they are a very large exchange that has achieved enough of a network effect that in a world where only one exchange is used by people in the United States, it probably will be Coinbase. The only other competitors right now are Kraken--which I love but have to admit is quite a bit smaller--and... Binance.US... which I think is much more likely to perish under US regulatory crackdown.

But like, Bittrex wouldn't have been on my list yesterday and now can't be on my list as they decided to shut down in the United States, and I think the argument monero-mxr made--that this is because decentralized exchanges now exist and "long tail" centralized exchanges are somewhat pointless--makes a lot of sense.

But then people did the usual thing of kind of trying to claim decentralized exchanges were meaningless as you still are going to likely want at least one company to deal with USD directly... and that went too far, as the decentralized exchange can still dominate the landscape even if you still need this trivial dumb money pipe on the other side, the same way my ISP doesn't make anywhere need as much money as AOL was hoping to because it got commoditized by the world wide web.

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