If you assume that smart contracts are useful and important, then stablecoins are a necessary part of any smart contract ecosystem. If a smart contract can perform useful operations on tokens, then it makes sense that people might want to perform those operations on tokens which are stable.
I guess my confusion is that I'm coming from Bitcoin and Tether. Bitcoin doesn't have support for smart contracts (except in the form of Bitcoin Script, which is so limited that I'm not counting it). And Tether is far from non-custodial; it's very centralised. Then it's easy to wonder what Tether is for.
If you assume that smart contracts are useful and important, then stablecoins are a necessary part of any smart contract ecosystem. If a smart contract can perform useful operations on tokens, then it makes sense that people might want to perform those operations on tokens which are stable.
I guess my confusion is that I'm coming from Bitcoin and Tether. Bitcoin doesn't have support for smart contracts (except in the form of Bitcoin Script, which is so limited that I'm not counting it). And Tether is far from non-custodial; it's very centralised. Then it's easy to wonder what Tether is for.