I’m a smart contract and altcoin developer. Yes it’s confusing now but there is a path forward.

USDC and Dai are both US-dollar stable coins. They’re always worth 1 dollar each, they’re among the most trustworthy USD stablecoins, and they are perfect for storefronts. The problem is that Ethereum transaction (tx) fees are now around $15-$25 because the network is so popular. Everyone wants to use the highway but the highway is only so big. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to increase the size of that highway by some order of magnitude to make each transaction cost cents to send but we won’t know until it happens in few years. But we need a solution now! — and not in a few years!

That’s where other less popular but still good enough networks [side chains] like Polygon, Stellar, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, and a few others come into play.

Side chain is a term for a non-Ethereum or non-Bitcoin blockchain. Think of it like getting off a tollroad and getting onto a less trafficked, cheaper, and possibly faster side road, with the risk of coming across some new undocumented potholes.

USDC (and probably Dai too) for example, can already run on the Binance(bsc20), Ethereum(ERC20), Polygon, Tron, Stellar, and a few other networks. This can be super confusing and shocking for users because if you send your BSC20 USDC to an ERC20 USDC address you usually lose it. It’s a good thing that many of these networks have different address formats and that helps considerably to have software preventing that goof but some networks like BSC20 and ERC20 share the same address format because ERC20 is a copy of BSC20. Very user unfriendly. Alright I know I might be loosing you here but the solution is next.

Now, here’s what I think a solution to this all is: Rename one existing Stablecoin on one of those networks and let’s call it something idealistic like Freecoin. For example, DAI on the Polygon network or something else. To make it simple, it’s only one coin on one cheap network that is anything but the Ethereum network and then boom, you’ve dropped your terminology down to just “Freecoin” and “where is an easy on-ramp to buy it?” It’s important that there is only 1 kind of Freecoin. Buy them on this Shopify website, these exchanges, or this DeFi exchange. Obviously you can allow people to pay with other cryptocurrencies but you can either give a 1%-2% discount for using a certain cryptocurrency or make the UI button for your cryptocurrency larger than the buttons for the other cryptocurrencies. Both are effective nudges.

If you have a product worth buying, people will beat a path to your doorstep.

Yea, it's a lot of foreign concepts. Bit of a learning curve to it. Whether or not the incentives are great enough so that the public goes past the learning curve is going to be interesting to see.