Isn't the USDC token from them?
It's both Circle and Coinbase being the main entities behind USDC.
https://www.centre.io/usdcWouldn't he be meaning USDC when mentioning “Money and Payments in the Digital Age”? Of course like the other stablecoins you would need to pay the fee in the coin's blockchain its running from, so its also a poor substitude.
Want to send some usdc? did you add enough eth in your wallet first? Nope, not going to work...
It's an interesting topic for sure, because Vitalik has always been against economical abstraction, but it's obvious that he wants you to buy Ether in order to play around with tokens running on top of Ethereum. What Vitalik wants, that happens. I don't think he will ever allow fees to be paid in the tokens people use instead of being forced to always have a little bit of Ether in your wallet.
I read an article like a few months ago where TRON was said to be free to use (i.e. that there are no fees). If that's actually the case, then their USDT tokens can be transferred natively without having TRON in your wallet.