Facebook’s Libra project has been making so many headlines it now looks like some other top U.S. companies want to get in on the action, too.
Specifically, breaking news about Walmart’s patent for a stablecoin project makes a lot of sense in light of that firm’s profit strategies to date.
Citizens of significant age remember the early days of Walmart when the retail chain swept the country, displacing a lot of mom-and-pop shops and snatching up enormous amounts of consumer market share with bargain-basement prices.
If Walmart can do the same thing with the stablecoin, that’s a brand new frontier for the Walton family to rake in more wheelbarrows of cash and siphon quite a lot of economic gains from the North American market.
Patent filing for the proposed stablecoin method involves a situation where the company’s own coin would be backed up by the U.S. dollar.
Here’s how coverage from Cointelegraph describes the project, quoting from a patent application filed August 1:
“Generating one digital currency unit by tying the one digital currency unit to a regular currency; storing information of the one digital currency unit into a block of a blockchain; buying or paying the one digital currency unit.”
Experts have described these types of plans as corporations essentially “becoming their own banks.”
This idea also dovetails well with Walmart’s previous strategies of offering low-income and unbanked people prepaid cards and other tools for in-store purchases.
“Early on in the filing, Walmart proposes that the launch of its digital currency could provide low-income households, for whom banking is costly, with ‘an alternative way to handle wealth at an institution that can supply the majority of their day-to-day financial and product needs.’” writes Marie Huillet at Cointelegraph today.
The stablecoin would similarly allow people to have a place to store value other than a depositor account at a bank.
All of it raises the question, though, of who is in line to profit the most from blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.
Facebook’s project, for example, is getting a lot of blowback from U.S. regulators and legislators.
What will they think of Walmart’s play?
Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan Chase is getting in on the action with its JPM coin, even after Jamie Dimon poked fun at cryptocurrencies for several years.
One thing all of this means to investors is vibrant opportunity in the cryptocurrency market.
If you believe that these corporate plays are going to be successful, start looking for secondary blockchain stocks that benefit not from a rising value of a single coin, but from momentum toward a sea change to digital currency in general.
