Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are great, and in some ways they make great money, but the fact is very few people around the world use them.

The US dollar on the other hand is used by almost everybody.

When it comes to money, network effects are very important, and the USD has the mother of all network effects.

So what if you could take the US dollar and somehow put it on a blockchain?

Suddenly you’d have a system that is open, global, digital, and efficient on which the world can easily access the dollar.

Instead of just cryptocurrencies being kept track of on a blockchain, suddenly you can use a currency that is 1000x more useful in commerce.

Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are best thought of as low-level infrastructure. They are not the product. They are the platform on which everything else is built.

Just like the internet is not HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol, it’s all the applications that you can build on top of it.

Dollars on the blockchain make dramatic improvements over the existing system in two ways: access and efficiency.

Just like the internet, it benefits individuals and corporations alike.

Here are some examples of the impact of dollars on the blockchain:

Mariano, a software developer in Argentina. Over the last 5 years, the Argentine peso has declined 90% against the US dollar. Cryptodollars make it easy to access USD to protect his savings.

Then there’s this European bank. They’re using Ethereum to move USD to their customers because it’s much more efficient than SWIFT.

There are also billions of people around the world that want to participate in the dollar economy but find USD difficult to source. By creating a synthetic USD on a public, accessible system suddenly you’ve plugged the whole world into the global economy.