# Reclaiming our $8 billion: funding public goods with stablecoin profits by Garm | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 08:41
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-J2aw52g_OJI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2aw52g_OJI

## Description

Ethereum is stuck in a dark deal with two companies. They control ~all stablecoins; facilitate 49% of DEX swaps; and can overrule all future hardforks:

Circle & Tether.

In return, they reap $7.4B in stablecoin earnings (2023).

But wait—that’s the interest on OUR money! We should be in control.

Giving to holders is illegal, but funding public goods isn’t.

If we coordinate, we can switch to nonprofit stablecoins and reclaim billions for eg Protocol Guild, R&D, DeFi infra, OSS—or other causes.

Speaker(s): Garm
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Coordination
Keywords: Decentralization Improvements, Censorship Resistance, Open Source Software, stablecoin

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum, https://warpcast.com/devcon
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more.

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Music] hey Defcon I'm K and one of the co-founders of glow dollar and I'm here to talk about claim oh sorry one back uh reclaiming our 8 billion through funding public goods with stable coin profits um you may not know this but there's two tokens that are involved in 47% of all deck swaps I am talking of course about using d c and USD um and because of this they're making a pretty healthy profit tether reported 5 billion in profits in the first half of 2024 and they're earning that profit basically on the backs of the ethereum ecosystem embracing uh these table coins and how do they actually do this well uh tether and circle basically have a duopoly on all of these table coins approximately 155 billion in market cap and then they earn about 5% yield on that which is a lot of money um there's two problems with this 8 billion though uh one this 8 billion is extracted from the ecosystem and two because of the duopoly we are compromising on decentralization and censorship resistance let's start with the latter so a duopoly controlling critical infrastructure like this is very dangerous um for three reasons a duopoly gives single points of failure it can get lazy or greedy and it breaks censorship resistance let's dive into each a little bit closer sir um so when the uh usdc deack happened during the svb bank run we saw that there was a huge liquidity crunch on Unis Swap and curve and basically most tokens became untradable during that period this is an existential threat to the ecosystem because if everything breaks down if one of the stable coins go down you end up with a problem secondly uh a du can get lazy or greedy when the risk-free rate was about 5% tether was making 8% so they're doing some with the assets back in your stable coins that is more risky and could result in it going unstable and just because they want to make $80 on every thousand uh dollars of usdt out there third duopoly breaks censorship resistance this is something that falic highlighted a couple of years ago basically whenever eth needs to do a contested heart Fork uh Circle and tether could decide which one is going to be the canonical one and to be honest a defi that depends on two companies is decentralized in name only how about that 8 billion and how it's extracted from the ecosystem can we reclaim it as an industry um can we use these billions for something better than uh basically having Circle and tether uh buy islands and jetpacks after all holding usdt is funding tether at no cost if we would take that 8 billion uh that they are earning and we distributed equally amongst all of the Devcon attendees this year every single one of them would get 600k that's a ton of money we can do something much better with it unfortunately giving the profits directly to you is illegal in most countries so we need to find something else we could fund the ecosystem we could pay 50 times ethereum Foundation yearly budget with that uh or 75 times optimism's retr funding spending today or triple all ethereum validators income cover all ops expensive expenses of l2s we could outspend the Pharma Lobby which is the largest Lobby on the planet and still have 2 billion left that two billion we could then direct into things that improve the state of the planet and have crypto in a good light for once and graduate from a cockroach of the economy to a flagship through Lifting for instance people out of extreme poverty providing meals or buying malaria Nets so next time you're faced with using a stable coin you can choose between big stable coin which keeps all the yields and buys Islands or you could use a yield bearing stable which is illegal in most countries and thus forced offshore which is riskier or you could choose glow dollar a US issued and regulated stable coin that uses its profits to fund public goods and Charities um so after all holding low dollar is funding public goods at no cost so we call this autop pgf automatic public goods funding at zero cost uh we're already doing this so we fund organizations like protocol Guild uh gitcoin optimism retr funding sell public goods endowment give it every month uh we started this a year well sorry uh you can do this in our dap uh and you can just easily select after you collected your connected your wallet you can select options like optimism's retr funding um we started this a year ago in the first month we donated $150 this uh month we're donating 4,000 so that's a pretty Healthy Growth uh in a year after this talk I hope you help us capture 1% of the stable coin market after which we would be able to donate 6 million uh uh to projects within the ecosystem every month um how can you do this you can start by diversifying your usdt and usdc holdings start with 10% today ramp it up to 100% by the end of the year you can ask your employer to be paid in a different uh stable or you could integrate glow Dollar in your depb directly um I hope uh you are as excited as I am about reclaiming our 8 billion and that you'll start funding public goods within uh the crypto ecosystem with me thank you thank you Garen um it's a very cool project I need to say anyone with in audience with okay uh the gentleman in the red shirt catch it catch it uh could you talk a little bit more about how holders choose which public goods the funds go to and how might that change its scale um sure yeah so it's very easy you go to app . glow dollar.org there you connect your wallet based on how many glow dollars you have you will see an amount of funds that that will generate on a yearly basis then you can choose recipients uh we currently have eight in a list these can be either causes so for instance uh web free public goods or individual recipients like uh giveth um and then uh if you add them to your bucket of recipients you want to have you can choose which percentage each is going to get let's say you want do 50/50 then uh you sign a message we uh store it and then at the end of the month we tally everything up and donate it to the uh relevant organizations cool do we have other questions in the audience one in a back yes hi there great presentation I just wondered if there if you could outline if there's any uh differences of a negative variety between the main stable coins and what you're doing I mean is there any would there be any disadvantage in using glow dollar what's the biggest challenge for that well um of course there are some disadvantages but at its core it's just a similar um stable coin as usdc we are us issued 100% Fiat backed by cashing us treasuries we follow the same license model so it's the same sort of risk framework um that said we are not as ubiquitous as usdc so you might not be able to use it at all exchanges or in your favorite def5 platforms uh but you can hold it in exactly the same way in your wallet as you do usdc great thank you very much we have time for one more question anyone okay over there hey what type of organization is glow dollar is a nonprofit glow dollar is currently structured as a nonprofit that means that we do not have the exact uh 501c3 status in the US yet but we are what's called a non-stock corporation uh that means that there is no equity there's no token there's just directors and then within our um um statutes of the organization It also says that we cannot distribute dividends um or anything of that kind we can only distribute salaries and we are working on becoming an actual nonprofit in the near future cool actually still a little bit of time left any more questions from from the audience anyone if not thank you g thank you so much for the sharing today now we're