They were right.
They said every app would have a balance, that how we think about money would change forever, that there was no going back, and that the future would be freer and faster. They said increasing the bandwidth of money would mean economic prosperity and it would unlock opportunity for everyone. They said there would be a computer in every house, a computer in every pocket, the internet would be everywhere we are, that protocols are the next frontier, and we think they were right.
When we think about what lies ahead, we know there will be questions about why the world needs Brale at all. You could consider this a manifesto of sorts. We hope it helps clarify our intentions.
When we began building our first products we came from the perspective of what does the market need in order to realize the potential of protocols? It was hard to imagine a world where protocols reach their potential without digital dollars, stablecoins, or equivalents by any name so we set out to make that much easier. In 2022, launching a stablecoin was a pursuit that could cost you a hundred million dollars. A hundred million. Let that sink in for a moment. That's the price of exclusivity, the price of limitation. The price of saying to millions of inventors and creators around the world, “This isn't for you.”
We refuse to accept that.
In 2023, protocols reached a point where they can now be used instead of traditional ledgering technologies making them an ideal technology for various forms of global commerce. Across payments (i), embedded finance (ii), and institutional use cases (iii) there is an opportunity to expand the velocity of money by leveraging these new technologies. The key to the adoption curve is that these new technologies are no longer just novel, they are the better tool for the job.
There is no going back.
Expanding the economic velocity of money means expanding opportunity, GDP, and forms of commerce it's possible we haven't even thought of yet. The challenge is that many of these technologies remain incredibly difficult to use, to launch compliant solutions with, and to scale. Much like early forms of the internet were hard to understand, sounds like a modem offer a mirror to past breakthroughs. One could say the same about everything from early e-commerce stores or computers, which were notoriously difficult and expensive to build, to computer vision, LLMs, or any flavor of cutting edge technology in the current context.
Our stablecoin issuance platform, for example, consolidates the technology and compliance requirements into a standardized set of processes that reduces that $100M requirement into a 2-minute process that costs about $1. Our hope is this (and other products) lead to a step function increase in the number of projects launching in the space and taking advantage of these promising new technologies accelerating the rate at which they can be adopted.
In short, we hope to accelerate the world's transition to onchain, even if what we mean by that term may not be well understood yet. We don't think the future of protocols belongs to a company or a single form of value. We think the potential of protocols is realized when developers can create in ways that weren't ever conceivably possible and we think that starts with stablecoins, digital dollars, or a balance on protocols by any name. Like a math equation, if you show a dollar sign to someone anyone in the world, it's universal.
What does Brale mean?
The name Brale pays homage to Louis Braille, someone who invented a new form of communication to open the world for generations of people who came after him. The work done by Louis Braille uses raised dots as its form of interaction and understanding. Brale was inspired by a special affinity for dots, networks, nodes, and interconnected systems, and a deep desire to communicate something that is at times difficult to find the words to explain — to the point of feeling compelled to make it one's life mission to try.