SpaceX uses stablecoins to dodge foreign exchange risks, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said in the All-In podcast on Friday.
Foreign exchange risk refers to the risk of losses that could arise from drastic fluctuations in a currency. For example, if a U.S. company has customers in Brazil that pay in Real (BRL), the company could stand to lose money when converting to U.S. dollars.
Using stablecoins as a hedge
According to Palihapitiya, SpaceX collects payments from all customers of Starlink in “long-tail countries,” and converts them to stablecoins. Starlink, which is wholly owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, provides satellite internet services.
Palihapitiya said the company re-converts the stablecoins to dollars in the U.S..
“When they [SpaceX] aggregate them [payments] in all of these long-tail countries, they don’t want to necessarily take the foreign exchange risk. They don’t want to deal with sending wires.”
According to Palihapitiya, stablecoins should become the primary method of cross-border transactions in the U.S., which would allow “us to chip away all of this decrepit infrastructure that the banks use to sort of slow down and tax a process that should never have been taxed.”
Stablecoin providers competing with traditional financial institutions
Stablecoin providers like Tether and Circle are emerging as worthy contenders that will give banks a run for their money when it comes to money storage and transfer services.
But it’s not just the banks the stablecoin providers are competing with. Stablecoin providers are also contending with traditional payment giants like MasterCard and American Express, Palihapitiya said.
He added that reducing the cost of cross-border transfers by even 3%—which is what Stripe charges—”would be a boon to global GDP (gross domestic product).”
Aaron Levie, the CEO of enterprise cloud firm Box, agreed with Palihapitiya and said that stablecoins replacing costly traditional transaction mediums “makes total sense.”
With SpaceX being run by Elon Musk, a fan of meme coin DOGE, it comes as no surprise that the firm uses stablecoins. Elon Musk’s Tesla invested heavily in Bitcoin—an investment that has clearly paid off with the investment value crossing the $1 billion mark last month as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) started surging after Donald Trump’s election victory.
Since taking over Twitter and rebranding the social media platform to X, Musk has enabled X users to send Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as ‘tips’ to other users. There has also been widespread speculation about crypto’s role in X’s upcoming payments feature.
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