Artem Tolkachev is Chief RWA Officer at Falcon Finance, which builds collateral-first dollar infrastructure.
What actually determines whether a stablecoin gets usednot just parked, is whether the venues where people shop, borrow and hedge will accept it as collateral. Can you post it as margin on an exchange? Does it get a reasonable loan to value on a loan market? Can it move across venues without losing so much to cuts that it becomes irrelevant? Collateral acceptance is the line between a dollar token sitting in a wallet earning a coupon and one doing real work in the financial system. The difference, parked versus used, is not academic. A parked token is inert capital; a token that the market accepts as collateral lets its holder trade, borrow and hedge without selling it, which is the whole reason for keeping a dollar on-chain instead of dollars in a bank.
This is the variable that almost no one prices. We are adding tens of billions of dollars in new stablecoin supply on the assumption that supply equals true adoption. It doesn’t. If this supply arrives while the exchange and venue risk teams leave their safety framework exactly where they are, the result will not be adoption, it will be stranded collateral: tens of thousands of billions of dollars that are technically alive, dutifully earning their 3% and going exactly nowhere.
