There is, in the broader cultural conversation about digital assets, a quiet bias against the stablecoin. The bias is rarely articulated, but it is detectable. Stablecoins, the implicit argument runs, are not interesting. They do not move. They do not produce screenshots. They do not, in the language of the trading floor, produce stories. They sit in wallets and remain, with admirable consistency, what they were the day they arrived.
The Club holds the opposite view.
The case for stillness
We hold the view that the stablecoin is, in many respects, the most considered instrument that the broader space has produced. It is, for the patient associate, a form of dry powder that does not require explanation to a spouse. It is, for the social planner, a settlement layer that does not require timing the market.
There is a long tradition, in the contemplative literature of several civilizations, of valuing stillness. The Stoics wrote about it. The Trappists practiced it. The English country house cultivated it (with the assistance of staff, but no matter). The Japanese tea ceremony enshrined it as a discipline. In all of these traditions, the recurring observation is the same: stillness is not the absence of activity. Stillness is the achievement of a state in which activity becomes optional.
The stablecoin, in its small way, offers an analog. The position is held. The position is not, in any meaningful sense, doing anything. The associate who holds it has made an active decision (to remain in cash, to wait, to consider) and has then translated that decision into a form that requires no further attention.
A defense of the boring
The Club, it should be said, has a long-standing affection for the boring. We have been known to host evenings whose published agenda consisted, in its entirety, of the words "dinner, then more dinner." We have, on at least one occasion, invited a speaker to address us on the subject of municipal bonds. The speaker received a standing ovation, which the speaker had not, in his own account, expected.
The stablecoin belongs in this tradition. It is the asset class equivalent of the dinner that is just dinner. There is no surprise. There is no event. There is, simply, an instrument that has been designed to do one thing and that, for the most part, does it.
A note for newer associates
Newer associates sometimes ask whether the Club has a position on which stablecoins are appropriate to hold. We do not. This is not because we lack opinions; it is because the opinions are, in our judgment, the kind of opinions that should be formed by the associate, with the associate's own advisor, in the associate's own time.
We will see our patient associates at the next gathering. The agenda, we are pleased to say, will include dinner.
