Someone once traded 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas. Stablecoins exist so that never has to happen again

[2026]

In 2010, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz made one of the most famous purchases in Bitcoin's history, paying 10,000 bitcoin for two Papa John's pizzas worth about 41 dollars at the time. Those coins would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars at recent prices, and the story has become the classic illustration of exactly why Bitcoin, for all its innovation, makes for a terrible everyday currency, nobody wants to risk their coffee money potentially becoming a life changing sum, or a life changing sum potentially becoming coffee money, within the space of a single afternoon

Stablecoins exist specifically to solve that problem. Rather than floating freely like Bitcoin or Ethereum, a stablecoin is pegged to something steady, usually the US dollar, so that one unit is designed to always be worth close to one dollar, no matter what the rest of the crypto market is doing that day. Think of it like a casino chip, you exchange real money for something that holds a fixed, predictable value, making it far more practical to actually spend, save or use as a stable trading pair without constantly worrying about wild price swings

Different stablecoins maintain that peg in different ways, some hold an actual reserve of real dollars in a bank account backing every single coin issued, others use crypto collateral locked away in smart contracts, and some rely purely on algorithms to adjust supply automatically based on demand, an approach that has proven considerably riskier and has been directly linked to some of the more dramatic crypto collapses in recent years. Despite rarely making headlines the way Bitcoin's price swings do, stablecoins have quietly grown to represent two of the five largest cryptocurrencies by total market value, becoming genuinely essential infrastructure for the rest of the crypto ecosystem

What are stablecoins, the cryptocurrencies designed to be boring?www.businessofbusiness.com

[GhostRider]

The pizza story is such a perfect, almost painful illustration of exactly why volatility makes a currency practically unusable for everyday spending

[Seb_70]

The casino chip analogy is the clearest explanation of a peg I have come across, instantly makes the whole concept click

[MJF]

Algorithmic stablecoins being the riskier category tracks with everything I remember reading about the more dramatic stablecoin collapses, glad to see that risk explicitly called out here

[Matthew97]

It is wild that something explicitly designed to be boring ended up becoming essential infrastructure for the entire crypto industry rather than a niche curiosity

[IronFist56]

Two of the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap being stablecoins is a stat that surprised me, they really do quietly dominate despite never making dramatic headlines

[ProperMadlad20]

This explains the whole appeal of stablecoins in one sentence, they solve the exact problem that makes Bitcoin bad as an everyday spending currency

[NeutrinoX74]

The distinction between fiat backed, crypto backed and algorithmic stablecoins is a useful framework, not all stablecoins actually carry the same level of risk despite sharing the same name

[Shark]

Good reminder that boring is an actual design goal here, not a lack of ambition, stability itself is the entire value proposition

[Aisha98]

Laszlo Hanyecz has to be one of the most expensive pizza orders in human history, that story never stops being painful to think about