How to be a Geographic Decentralisation Maxi
And make a tidy profit from local stablecoins while at it
We’re open sourcing reasonably decent software we use to make markets in Nigeria for cNGN.
The near total dominance of USD stablecoins has meant that market making and trading are almost entirely centralised in the US and Europe. This is bad for censorship resistance, it is bad for higher latency participants in the rest of the world, and it is bad for the consensus properties of the most decentralised blockchains.
Local stablecoins could help break the pattern. Profitable arbitrage loops often run through local fiat, local bank accounts, and local exchange venues that global desks structurally cannot access. That is not a temporary edge. It might be the missing ingredient that pulls geographic decentralisation from slogan into something real.
Our new research piece lays out:
Why local fiat access is a meaningful moat for market makers
What good market making for an EM stablecoin should look like, including doing things which sound simple, but are not, like discovering the real price of the Naira
Why we’re open-sourcing our reference implementation now