A Car Dressed as a Horse

Last night I read a letter from Ron Tarter, CEO of MNEE App, the new name RockWallet is taking. I made a video on MNEE, when I was excited and hopeful that a stablecoin was using BSV. [Using MNEE, the USD stable coin on Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) with RockWallet, https://youtu.be/NKxCDGMtYrY]

So my first reaction to this announcement was disappointment. MNEE, the dollar stablecoin they issued on BSV (and on Ethereum), is being retired, and I had wanted to see it grow. Not because I believe in stablecoins, I will get to that, but because I want things built on BSV to succeed, and I am sorry for the people who put work into it.

My second reaction was that it did not surprise me at all.

What happened

The letter is here: [MNEE on X](https://x.com/MNEE_cash/status/2116213909069959462). In short:

• The MNEE token will be retired on 30 November, both on 1Sat Ordinals (BSV) and as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Holders can sell it, swap it for other stablecoins or crypto, or redeem it one to one for USDC.
• The stablecoin account in the app, at least at first, will hold Open USD: a dollar token issued by Bridge and created by Open Standard, whose founding members include Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa. MNEE App may be paid through this arrangement.
• The app is adding a checking account through a US partner bank, a debit card and direct deposit. Because of the bank accounts, every customer will have to verify their identity.
• Customers outside the United States can no longer be served, and the app will serve most US states.
• RockWallet 1.0, where users held their own seed phrase, closes on 7 December. In 2027 the app moves to a fully custodial model, where the company safeguards customers' assets for them.

The company gives its own reasons for retiring MNEE: larger stablecoins are already widely used, demand for MNEE on 1Sat Ordinals has been low, and the new US GENIUS Act, whose consumer protections they say they welcome, raises the cost and complexity of running a stablecoin at their size.

Is it still a BSV business?

In my eyes, a business that stops building on BSV is no longer a BSV business. That sounds obvious, but it is worth saying out loud.

There is a twist. The letter says customers can keep buying, selling, swapping and holding BSV in the app, alongside BTC, BCH and many others. So BSV is still there, as something to trade. But the stablecoin account at the heart of the new app will hold somebody else's dollar token, not their own token on BSV. BSV is no longer where their own money product lives. It is one item on a list of coins.

I wrote about why I do not want BSV on exchanges](The Wrong Kind of Demand, https://bsvsearch.com/node/3647): when BSV is only something to speculate on, it is not being used as money. Here it is happening inside a company that once built on it.

The lesson is the path, not the failure

To be fair, MNEE's failure on its own proves very little. A small stablecoin up against Tether and USDC was always going to have a hard time, whatever chain it ran on. If I said "MNEE failed, so I was right", that would be lazy.

What convinces me is not the failure. It is the path the company is now taking. Look at it as a sequence:

1. Their own dollar token, issued on BSV and Ethereum, is replaced by someone else's: Open USD, created by Open Standard, a group whose founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and Shopify.
2. Customers who held their own keys in RockWallet 1.0 are moved out, and from 2027 the app holds customers' assets for them.
3. A service with customers around the world, including an international app, becomes a service for the United States only.
4. Every customer has to prove who they are.

None of these steps is unreasonable on its own. Each one makes sense once you have decided to compete on fiat's ground: if you are going to be a dollar product, you need banks, licences, regulators, card networks, and all their rules. But put the steps together and you arrive almost exactly at the system Bitcoin was meant to be an alternative to.

That is my belief, and I think this is evidence for it: if you build on fiat's terms, fiat's rules will eventually take over your product.

A car dressed as a horse

The picture I keep coming back to is a car dressed up as a horse so that it can pull a carriage.

You can do it. The car will pull the carriage. But you have thrown away everything that made it a car. You are not using its speed, its range or its engine. You are spending all your effort making it look and behave like the thing it was meant to replace.

That is what happens when a BSV project flirts with fiat, through stablecoins or by preparing for CBDCs. BSV can do things fiat cannot: payments of a fraction of a cent, money moving directly from one person to another with nobody holding it in between, the same rules for someone in Lagos as for someone in Ghent. A project that spends its energy making BSV look, act and smell like dollars gives all of that up.

It also misses where stable value really comes from. In my piece on exchanges I used the example of a crate of milk: a shop will not pay five times as much for the same crate next week. Prices become stable when money is used to buy real things, again and again. You do not get there by pegging BSV to the dollar. You get there by using BSV as money.

The other side

There are two serious objections, and I want to answer them rather than wave them away.

"People need dollar stability today." 

That is true. Most people and most shops count in dollars or euros, and BSV's price moves. But using a dollar token on BSV does not make BSV more stable. It only postpones the moment people start counting in satoshis. Every product that prices in BSV, and every person who earns and spends it, moves us closer to that moment.

"Custody is safer." 

The letter makes this case, and it is a real one: when people hold their own keys, lost keys mean lost money. Tarter says he respects people who hold their own keys and admits the change has tradeoffs. I appreciate the honesty. I simply choose the other side of that tradeoff. Holding your keys means nobody can freeze your money, nobody can drop your country, and nobody has to approve you before you can use it. That is a large part of why BSV is worth using in the first place.

I do not think the people behind MNEE App are villains. They made business decisions under real pressure. I just think the road they chose leads somewhere I do not want BSV to go.

What this means for me, and for anyone building on BSV

On BSVSearch, prices are set and paid in satoshis. When a reader buys an article, their wallet pays the writer's wallet directly. There is no stablecoin, no custody, no balance held on anybody's behalf.

That comes with a cost, and I will not pretend it does not. If the price of BSV doubles, an article priced at 2000 satoshis costs a reader twice as much in their own currency. Writers will sometimes have to reprice, and readers will notice. I accept that. It is part of using BSV as money rather than as a mirror of the dollar.

I also draw a clear line. When I explain a price to a newcomer, I might translate it into dollars so they can picture it. That is a translation, not a dependency. What I will not do is price in fiat, settle in fiat or hold people's money in fiat. Translating to help someone understand is fine. Building on fiat is the flirting.

So here is what I would say to anyone building on BSV:

"Don't make BSV look like fiat. Make it worth using as BSV. Price in satoshis. Settle in satoshis. Leave fiat at the door."

The car was built to drive. Let's drive it.

Marquez