What Is a Stablecoin?
Stablecoins are coins that have the cryptocurrencies value pegged on or tied, Stablecoins aim to provide an alternative to the high volatility of the most popular cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), which has made such investments less suitable for wide use in transactions.
Understanding Stablecoins
Though Bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency, it tends to suffer from high volatility in its price, or exchange rate. For instance, Bitcoin’s price rose from an intraday low barely above $4,000 in March 2020 to nearly $65,000 in April 2021 only to plunge almost 50% over the next two months. Intraday swings can also be wild; the cryptocurrency often moves more than 10% in the span of a few hours.
All this volatility can be great for traders, but it turns routine transactions like purchases into a risky speculation for the buyer and seller. Investors holding cryptocurrencies for long-term appreciation don’t want to become famous for paying 100 000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. Meanwhile, most merchants don’t want to end up taking a loss if the price of a cryptocurrency plunges after they get paid in it.
To serve as a medium of exchange, a currency that’s not legal tender must remain relatively stable, assuring those who accept it that it will retain purchasing power in the short term. Among traditional fiat currencies, daily moves of even 1% in forex trading are relatively rare.
As the name implies, stablecoins aim to address this problem by promising to hold the value of the cryptocurrency steady in a variety of ways.
Types of Stablecoins
Some would argue that stablecoins are a solution in search of a problem given the wide availability and acceptance of the U.S. dollar. Many cryptocurrency adherents, on the other hand, believe the future belongs to digital tender not controlled by central banks. There are three types of stablecoins based on the mechanism used to stabilize their value.
Fiat-Collateralized Stablecoins
Fiat-collateralized stablecoins maintain a reserve of a fiat currency (or currencies) such as the U.S. dollar, as collateral assuring the stablecoin’s value. Other forms of collateral can include precious metals like gold or silver as well as commodities like crude oil, but most fiat-collateralized stablecoins have reserves of U.S. dollars.
Such reserves are maintained by independent custodians and are regularly audited. tether (USDT) and TrueUSD (TSUDT) are popular stablecoins backed by U.S. dollar reserves and denominated at parity. to the dollar.
As of May 2022, Tether (USDT) was the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, worth more than $83 billion.1
Crypto-Collateralized Stablecoins
Crypto-collateralized stablecoins are backed by other cryptocurrencies. Because the reserve cryptocurrency may also be prone to high volatility, such stablecoins are over-collateralized—that is, the value of cryptocurrency held in reserves exceeds the value of the stablecoins issued.
A cryptocurrency worth $2 million might be held as reserve to issue $1 million in a crypto-backed stablecoin, insuring against a 50% decline in the price of the reserve cryptocurrency. For example, MakerDAO’s Dai (DAI) stablecoin is pegged to the U.S. dollar but backed by Ethereum (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies worth 150% of the DAI stablecoin in circulation.2
Algorithmic Stablecoins
Algorithmic stablecoins may or may not hold reserve assets. Their primary distinction is the strategy of keeping the stablecoin’s value stable by controlling its supply through an algorithm, essentially a computer program running a preset formula.
In some ways that’s not so different from central banks, which also don’t rely on a reserve asset to keep the value of the currency they issue stable. The difference is that a central bank like the federal reserve sets monetary policy publicly based on well understood parameters, and its status as the issuer of legal tender does wonders for the credibility of that policy.
Algorithmic stablecoin issuers can’t fall back on such advantages in a crisis. The price of the TerraUSD (UST) algorithmic stablecoin plunged more than 60% on May 11, 2022, vaporizing its peg to the U.S. dollar, as the price of the related Luna token used to peg tera slumped more than 80% overnight.3
A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller directly written into lines of code. The code and the included agreements are stored by a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. The code controls the execution of the agreement, and transactions are trackable and irreversible.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that attempt to peg their market value to some external reference.
- Stablecoins are more useful than more volatile cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange.
- Stablecoins may be pegged to a currency like the U.S. dollar or to the price of a commodity such as gold.
- Stablecoins pursue price stability by maintaining reserve assets as collateral or through algorithmic formulas that are supposed to control supply. By Adam Hayes