At Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan on April 29, a policy discussion that might have once seemed fringe was given formal institutional visibility when Legislator Dr. Ko Ju-Chun presented a report advocating for the inclusion of Bitcoin in Taiwan’s national reserve strategy. The session took place during a formal interpellation and included direct engagement with Premier Cho Jung-tai and the governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Yang Chin-long. The report, produced by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, was not simply tabled as an academic exercise but actively introduced into executive-level consideration, which is part of what made the moment feel unusually weighty in tone.

The framing that pits stablecoins against central bank digital currencies as competing visions for the future of money is analytically convenient and mostly wrong. The two instruments are pursuing different use cases, attracting different users, and solving different problems. The competition, where it exists, is narrower than the rhetoric suggests.

Stablecoins — primarily USDT and USDC, which together account for the vast majority of the market — are settlement instruments for crypto-native activity. They allow traders to move between positions without exiting to fiat. They allow DeFi protocols to denominate loans and yields in dollar terms. They allow cross-border transactions to settle without the correspondent banking rails that add cost and latency to international payments. These are real functions. They are also functions that a retail CBDC, constrained by privacy concerns, programmability limits, and central bank conservatism, is not well positioned to perform.