Meta just started paying creators in USDC and the stablecoin people are weirdly quiet about it

Meta quietly started offering select creators the option to receive payouts in USDC this week and I genuinely don’t understand why this isn’t getting more attention. This is Meta.

A creator monetization infrastructure that pays out to millions of people globally. They just plugged stablecoin rails into that system

X meanwhile has been building X Money, an in-house payments product with a rumored 6% APY on deposits, a Visa debit card, and a stablecoin that Elizabeth Warren sent a formal letter about because Elon Musk helped write the legislation governing it while also dismantling the regulator that would police it. Meta is plugging into existing crypto infrastructure while X is trying to become the infrastructure.

The thing that’s genuinely funny about all of this is that Crypto Twitter, the community most likely to have opinions about which approach is better, architecturally sounder, more aligned with the cypherpunk ethos, or more likely to actually bank the unbanked, lives on X. They are posting about this on a platform that is actively building a competing payments product with all the regulatory conflicts of interest you could possibly ask for

The discourse about decentralized payments and financial sovereignty is happening inside a walled garden that is trying it’s darndest to be a bank.