Really? Stable-coins as a concept have existed for years, and in practice have blown up in trading volume and circulation the past 2 years.
USDC stable-coin [0]($34 Billion in circulation) is arguably the most trustworthy in terms of having a 1 to 1 exchangeable backing through a regulated centralized custodian (Circle/Coinbase primarily but also BlockFi and other entities that hold USD reserves for exchange).
Many of these entities (as well as "DeFi" decentralized finance platforms that use Ethereum or similar smart contracts to decentralize the process) allow for various forms of deposit and lending accounts that provide a whole range of yields way way above traditional banking deposits. On top of this, some of these custodians add an additional layer of payment ability to these deposit accounts. Crypto.com[1] for example has a Visa debit card that ties into your USDC/stable coin deposits that you can transact from, in theory avoiding needing to use fiat at all. As well as "CD-like" 3-month lockups where you can get 8-12% yield.
There are also many decentralized stable coins that have various forms of over-collateralized crypto-asset reserves backing the coin and algorithms to stabilize the value by buying or selling from these reserves, trading off possible volatility and uncertainty around peg to avoid centralization and KYC and other regulations of 1:1 backed coins.[2]
Comments
Really? Stable-coins as a concept have existed for years, and in practice have blown up in trading volume and circulation the past 2 years.
USDC stable-coin [0]($34 Billion in circulation) is arguably the most trustworthy in terms of having a 1 to 1 exchangeable backing through a regulated centralized custodian (Circle/Coinbase primarily but also BlockFi and other entities that hold USD reserves for exchange).
Many of these entities (as well as "DeFi" decentralized finance platforms that use Ethereum or similar smart contracts to decentralize the process) allow for various forms of deposit and lending accounts that provide a whole range of yields way way above traditional banking deposits. On top of this, some of these custodians add an additional layer of payment ability to these deposit accounts. Crypto.com[1] for example has a Visa debit card that ties into your USDC/stable coin deposits that you can transact from, in theory avoiding needing to use fiat at all. As well as "CD-like" 3-month lockups where you can get 8-12% yield.
There are also many decentralized stable coins that have various forms of over-collateralized crypto-asset reserves backing the coin and algorithms to stabilize the value by buying or selling from these reserves, trading off possible volatility and uncertainty around peg to avoid centralization and KYC and other regulations of 1:1 backed coins.[2]
[0] https://www.circle.com/en/usdc
[1] https://crypto.com/us/earn
[2] $MIM dollar stable-coin: https://cointelegraph.com/news/magic-internet-money-races-pa...