Every few years, rivers fill with mayflies.

They rise all at once—billions of fragile bodies lifting from the water in a single synchronized event.

For a brief window, the air itself is alive.

Fish gorge. Birds reroute their migrations. Entire ecosystems pivot around this sudden abundance.

For that short period of time, mayflies feel permanent. Inevitable. Everywhere.

Then, poof. They’re gone.

Some might mark that as failure. Biologists don’t.

They understand that the mayfly is built for the burst. It values coverage over longevity. Its purpose isn’t to last everywhere forever, but to move energy quickly through a system in sporadic eruptions when needed before vanishing back into it.

This is a natural pattern. One that shows up far beyond river ecosystems.

Take, for example, finance.

In moments of stress or constraint, instruments optimized for speed and coverage—emergency liquidity, arbitrage trades, SPAC cycles—appear everywhere at once.

But then conditions shift. Constraints reappear at the choke points. The swarm thins, having done exactly what it was designed to do.

This is how to think about stablecoins.

And, right now, we’re entering mayfly season.

Let’s talk about what this means. And why, despite calls to the contrary, it’s actually very bullish for crypto. 

Mayfly Money

Consider Venezuela.

Hyperinflation has destroyed trust in the bolívar (which lost over 99.99999999% of its value against the USD in the past decade)...

At the same time that U.S. sanctions blocked traditional banking channels for both the government and citizens.

In that vacuum, a strange new thing stepped in. Before the world even realized, Tether’s USDT became a de facto medium of exchange.

Not because the news told them to use it. Definitely not because the regime mandated it. But because it worked—cheap, fast, available at the moment institutions failed.

Groceries. Rent. Haircuts. Repairs. HOA fees. Remittances.

Even Maduro, though he railed publicly against “imperialist dollars,” embraced the dollar-pegged prosthetic because nothing else worked at scale under sanctions.

Billions in off-exchange volume. Millions on peer-to-peer platforms. The state oil company routed revenue through stablecoins to keep money moving.

Like mayflies, USDT swarms appeared everywhere at once. Fast. Cheap. Ubiquitous. For everyday life, it worked.

And it still works. The explosive utility burst is real and still present.

But so is the paradox.

The features that make it useful—central issuance, compliance hooks, easy scaling—also make it leashed.

One issuer. One legal interface. One point where authority can concentrate consequence. And when enforcement arrives, it doesn’t arrive broadly.

It arrives surgically.

In January 2026, roughly $182 million in USDT across a handful of wallets were frozen. We know this because we can see it on the blockchain.

No contagion. No bank run. No disruption to citizens buying food. Just regime-scale flows quietly crippled.

Moments like that reveal the new shape of power. Mayfly money thrives at the edges. Consequence concentrates at the center.

It doesn’t flip the table. But it definitely rearranges the room.

The New Rules of Money

Let’s face it.

If Washington truly wanted Tether gone, it would be gone.

It circulates because the incentives line up. Dollar stablecoins carry the dollar into places the U.S. no longer wants—or is able—to manage directly.

They keep trade, wages, and prices denominated in dollars even when banks fail, sanctions bite, and local currencies collapse.

Instead of policing every transaction or propping up foreign systems, the Trump administration is keen on letting private issuers handle the messy parts.

Then it steps in only at the narrow points that matter: issuance, reserves, compliance.

That’s the paradigm shift…

The U.S. isn’t defending dollar dominance the old way anymore, through treaties and institutions and rules-based order. It’s letting the swarm do the distribution while it controls the hatch.

Stablecoin issuers now hold more Treasury bills than most countries. They create captive, organic demand for U.S. debt without expanding the Fed’s balance sheet or begging foreign central banks to cooperate.

By the way, none of this resembles a coordinated master plan. It’s not elegant. It’s what an overstretched empire reaches for when something works—and says, “More!”

But there’s a twist…

And it has everything to do with Maduro’s alleged Bitcoin stash that’s proving a bit more difficult to freeze and confiscate.

That tension explains why stablecoins end up bullish for crypto at large.

More on that, and the shifting order, tomorrow.