Ford Broncos aside, cars no longer have much to do with horses. Yet we still measure engines in terms of “horsepower.”
The analogy was useful at first.¹ To explain a strange new machine to 19th-century ears, you reached for the familiar: This engine *slaps hood* can do the work of ten horses. The metaphor eventually became outdated, but it stuck anyway.
“Stablecoin” feels like that today. The term was born in crypto’s early, chaotic years, when wild volatility defined the space. Prices could swing 20% in the blink of an eye, making the technology unusable for everyday financial activity. If you wanted to send money, save, or lend, you needed something that didn’t behave like the Kingda Ka rollercoaster at Six Flags (RIP). So builders designed assets that could hold steady value.
The name was straightforward, if slightly defensive: not a volatile coin, but a stable one. It described the problem it solved perfectly. But the technology has since outgrown the label.
Stability is now table stakes. It’s a prerequisite, and not the point.
Stablecoins are no longer just a workaround for volatility. They have become foundational infrastructure for a new global financial system. They move value across borders instantly, settle immediately rather than in days, and can be held directly by anyone on the internet, no intermediary required. And because stablecoins run on programmable blockchains, they can also be embedded into applications in ways traditional money never could.
This is the shift stablecoins are enabling: from money as something managed by institutions to money that behaves like software.
Stability is now table stakes. It’s a prerequisite, and not the point. The question is no longer “will it hold its value?” but “what else can we build with it?”
That’s why the name “stablecoin” is outdated now: It still points to the original problem it was designed to solve, not the platform it has become. The term frames the category as a patch rather than a new primitive.
Like “horsepower,” the term stablecoins anchors us to an earlier mental model.
“The question is no longer “will it hold its value?” but “what else can we build with it?”
There’s a natural urge at this stage to rebrand, to find a term like “digital cash” or “programmable money” that better captures the essence of the technology. These alternatives are more accurate, but they’re clunky. The first term that gains traction usually enjoys a permanent first-mover advantage: People stop hearing the literal meaning as it evolves new ones. We still “dial” numbers on “smartphone” pocket computers, “cc” people on carbon-paperless emails, and “film” things with devices that have no film.
Stablecoins will probably follow the same quirky etymological path. The skeuomorphic name may linger long after it stops being descriptive. Or it may gradually fade as we simply speak of “digital dollars,” “digital euros,” and other “onchain assets.”
Most likely though, the technology will disappear into the background entirely and become just how money works, the same way we stopped saying “electric lighting” once that newfangled gadgetry became the default. Now they’re just lights.
I expect something similar to play out here: As stablecoins scale into the many trillions, underpin global payment flows, and sit at the center of financial applications worldwide, the name will matter less and less. What will matter is that money, for the first time, behaves like the rest of the internet: fast, programmable, ubiquitous.
And as that day arrives, “stablecoin” will sound less like a description and more like what it always was: a leftover metaphor… from the moment just before everything changed.
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¹“Horsepower” was coined by James Watt in a feat of marketing genius that hippomorphized his steam engines for British mine and mill owners in the late 1770s.
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Robert Hackett is features editor and head of special projects at a16z crypto.
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