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by seanhunter
1867 days ago
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If you wanted to operate a fully legitimate tethered cryptocurrency, you have to do two things. Firstly you have to make public the basket of holdings backing the currency and secondly you have to bake in an arbitrage mechachanism to ensure the price of the basket and the price of teh currency don't drift too much. The way this works for the most obvious analogous product I can think of in the financial markets (index ETFs like SPY https://www.ssga.com/us/en/institutional/etfs/funds/spdr-sp-... for instance) is known as the ETF creation and redemption mechanism. For any given ETF there is a pool of participating brokers who are entitled to create or redeem units in the etf with the ETF administrator. So if the price of the ETF gets too high relative to the assets then these brokers can buy the assets in the market and hand them in to the ETF admin who will add those assets to the ETF and give them in return the new units that are created as a result. This has the effect of raising the prices of the constituents and reducing the price of the ETF units (when the broker then sells those new units), bringing the prices back into equilibrium. Conversely if the ETF units are too cheap, the broker can buy the units in the market and redeem them for the correct proportion of underlying assets (ie exactly the reverse process) bringing the price into balance the opposite way. It's incredibly important for this mechanism (and the public record of assets in the basket it relies on) to be built in to the process if the price is to be truly tethered. Otherwise the tether is just an illusion and in the ETF world, ETFs which didn't have this type of mechanism went completely haywire and became defunct. |
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"In September 2019, Facebook announced that the reserve basket would be made up of: 50% United States dollar, 18% Euro, 14% Japanese yen, 11% Pound sterling and 7% Singapore dollar." [0]
Diem has, at this stage, halted tethering like this. They have since retreated physically (to the US) and ideologically (backing 100% by USD instead of a basket).
It is my understanding that they intended to operate Diem as you mentioned in your second point.
The primary issue with doing this is that, if its successful, and you have indeed created a more stable currency system (which is the intention of tethering/stablecoins in the first place), you will eventually be the mass currency, which will kill demand for nation state currencies (at least the ones not in the basket) outside of taxes.
This is why the Diem plan was shot down by global (banking) regulators, and also why stablecoins/tethering have never really operated outside of the digital realm (and to be frank, have merely serviced the pump and dump that is crypto today).
I 100% agree that the public record of these currencies has to be very clear and built into the process. Tether has repeatedly been misleading (weren't they originally 1:1 USD:Tether?) and even still, with these reports its hard to tell how the money is truly organized.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)#Curren...