Money has been used for thousands of years in physical forms such as gold and cash, only recently has it been moved to a digital form. With the convince of ATMs and online banking, including wire transfers, moving money has become munch more convenient. Stablecoins are arguably the next step in money as it becomes extremely convenient due to lack of restrictions that banks may put on our money resulting in volume restrictions, long transfer times and many others. This blog will outline how stablecoins can used by us Trinbagonians, both in commercial and personal use.
If you're unsure of what stablecoins are or how they work, please read "What are Stablecoins? | Trinidad and Tobago" to learn more.
1. Remittances.
One of the biggest challenges most people who send money back home to family or friends is having to utilize banks or remittance services such as MoneyGram, or Western Union. You may not want to pay the exorbitant fees of MoneyGram/ Western Union, or even want to wait 2-5 business days for a wire transfers to process. Both these problems are easily solved using stablecoins. By using services such as Sunshine Exchange to purchase stablecoins, or people who directly sell you stablecoins, you can easily obtain any amount of stablecoins you want then send. Once you have the stablecoins they can be sent to family or friends wallets within seconds for little (less than $1) to no fees. Once your family or friends has received the stablecoins, they can then directly convert those stablecoins to TTD by selling to people or selling to services such as Sunshine exchange. Using this method, you
avoid paying large fees and save time, sometimes you may even gain some money depending on who you sell to or buy from.
2. Frictionless personal or commercial cross-border payments.
Stablecoins can be sent anywhere to anyone without the need to be approved by a third party while also being processed within seconds. This enables you to easily and send money in and out of Trinidad and Tobago to pay for personal needs or commercial items once stablecoins are accepted.
3. Access to USD.
Stablecoins such as USDT and USDC are pegged to the value of the US dollar. You can convert your TTD to USDT to have your money in a more financial secure economy. This process can be done in large volumes as local banks have limits on the amount of USD you can get. If you have stablecoins you can also convert that into USD if you have a foreign bank account which enables you to carryout business transactions in USD if you need, therefore removing the forex shortage many companies in Trinidad and Tobago have.
4. Access to Higher Yields.
Most banks savings accounts in Trinidad and Tobago offer less than 2% per annum. By converting your TTD to USDT, you can deposit that USDT in to hundreds of different cryptocurrency based exchanges/ yield farms to earn higher yields, for example, Binance has a low risk feature called Binance earn that yields 3.5% per annum while also allowing you to withdraw up to 1 million USDT daily at any time. There are several other platforms that offer higher yields for greater risk, such as Nexo at 10% per annum (average) or extremely risky products that offer >10% per annum. However such high returns obviously come with very high risks and we do not recommend using any of these products unless you're willing to lose your investment.
How can they offer such high yields?
For low risk yields like Binance they have other services such as loans, trading fees etc... that have fees that are greater than the yield you're earning, this allows them to pay you to store you're USDT with them so they can utilize it in other ways. Although this sounds awfully like a bank, you're always able to withdraw you're money from it at anytime. medium risk yields like Nexo offer much higher returns as they operate as a loan platform mainly. They charge higher interest on loans they give out (around 16% per annum) thus allowing you to earn greater yields on your USDT.
High risk products that offer very high yields are often specific to the platform. If you're investing in high risk products read the method by which they operate before investing.