Making Pennies Into Money Again
Meet the guys behind the first stablecoin you can actually touch
The semi-truck backed directly into the building, crunching some of the office’s beige paint into crumbs. With some precarious maneuvering from the driver, a laid-back man named Vincent, the 7,000 pound delivery was ready to be unloaded. After 23 years of hauling cargo, he said this was his weirdest shipment.
“What’re you guys doing with a million pennies?” Vincent asked.
We were at the headquarters of Impulse Labs, a startup that has set out to develop a high-tech stove that boils water in seconds. In that moment, the lab’s founder, Sam D’Amico, along with his buddies, Will Stoeckle and Coleman Collins, became the proud owners of one million pennies. They were going to put them back into circulation.
Well, sort of.
Pennies and their precious zinc and copper are worth more in materials than their face value as currency. This is part of the reason the U.S. decided to cease production of the Abe Lincoln-celebrating discs. Our trio of tech enthusiasts embraced the penny’s demise as an opportunity. They chose to launch—in their words—an over-collateralized stable memecoin.
In the tradition of the antiquated but beloved gold standard, they’ve decided to back a cryptocurrency with one million physical pennies. One penny equals one token.
More simply, it’s a group of dudes who can drop $10,000 on a joke.
