The elections really had an immediate effect; crypto just won the U.S. elections, and the Treasury announced the news, eagerly wanting to issue official on-chain government bonds.
This article summarizes the Q4 report from the U.S. Treasury's Debt Management Office:
Let's start with the conclusion:
All assets will go on-chain; it’s just a matter of time, not whether it is allowed.
The government still needs to develop its own private permissioned chain; existing public chains are unlikely.
DTCC is likely to take on the responsibility of issuing on-chain assets.
Other projects can only participate in on-chain asset distribution
Now let's get to the point and see what the U.S. Treasury's report looks like:
First, let's say that the scale of crypto assets is still not large, just over two trillion, which is still small compared to stocks/bonds.
However, the growth rate of crypto assets is still very fast.
Stablecoins, as core assets in crypto, have 68% of their underlying assets in U.S. government bonds. (Tether is currently among the top 20 holders of U.S. bonds)
From the perspective of the U.S. Treasury, stablecoins are more like money market funds, while various cryptocurrencies are more like stocks, and NFTs theoretically can represent various assets.
Other than deposit tokens, other assets have projects working on them.
The potential of the future crypto financial market is enormous:
Tokenized assets far exceed existing native cryptocurrencies; various assets can go on-chain.
International payments will first experience huge benefits.
A high-performance, strongly cross-chain interactive unified ledger is needed (low-performance chains are excluded).
These ledgers need to be developed under the auspices of the central bank (all existing public chains are excluded).
Moreover, the U.S. Treasury mentioned that some projects are already working on on-chain government bonds, with the scale of on-chain government bonds being about 2 billion.
Additionally, the U.S. Treasury is frantically hinting that DTCC has the technical capability for this:
DTCC is the U.S. Depository Trust Company, where all U.S. stocks must have their original stock assets deposited with DTCC, and then these assets are registered in DTCC's database.
In fact, it would be best for DTCC to issue on-chain assets, as this would allow all U.S. stocks and ETFs to go on-chain together.
In the Treasury's report, DTCC's plan is ready:
Listing some advantages of DTCC, anyway, during this period, DTCC is the best choice in terms of compliance/safety/performance.
You see our public blockchains in crypto always crash; chains like SOL/TON that claim to be high-performance have also crashed. But the U.S. stocks issued by DTCC have rarely crashed, right?
The U.S. Treasury is also frantically calling for this, saying that open public chains are unreliable, and that the private permissioned chain solution developed by DTCC is better.
