Topic: [ANN][PRE-ICO]GID COIN - World-First Cryptocurrency covered by Diamonds and Gold - page 4. (Read 1442 times)

recently there are many projects related to gold. and everyone has his own ingenious idea. it's great that such an industry is developing, because it will help many people to benefit from such activities.

Hi everyone!

Please join discussion at Telegram Chat

https://t.me/gidcoin

Something about StableCoin P.5

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Stable Coins Analysis: Is There A Viable Solution For The Future?
In a 2013 paper published by David Yernack, the professor of finance at New York University stated that, for any currency to be useful to society, it should be able to function as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. At the time, he was using these three criteria to discredit Bitcoin as a feasible currency for everyday use. And there is some merit to this.
Although popular cryptocurrencies can be used as a medium of exchange on a small scale and in certain ecosystems, it struggles as a store of value or a unit of account. The reason for this is the inherent instability of cryptocurrencies. Possible price fluctuations of 20% or more on any given day make it unsuited to comply with the latter two functions of a usable currency.
To address this price volatility, a certain subset of cryptocurrencies started to emerge, i.e. stable coins. Being defined by Brigitte Luginbühl, CEO of SwissRealCoin:

“Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which are highly volatile, stable coins provide people with the pragmatic, helpful benefits of a cryptocurrency, without having to worry about distressing price changes since they are grounded in the real world.”

A stable coin is designed to have a stable price or value over a period of time, therefore, less volatile.
These coins aim to mimic the relative price stability of fiat currencies on one hand, but still keep the core values of cryptocurrencies such as decentralization and security, on the other hand.


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Gold is good, but it weight too much. That's why we mix it with diamonds, which lighter and more expensive )

Thank you!

We appriciate your interest in our project.

GID Coin is rated well on https://icosiren.com/ico/gidcoin/

Gold is always in demand, I think this project has excellent prospects!

Hello TimeTeller!
Thanks a lot for your deep analysis! You are quite right, that it has to be huge amount of paperwork.
We will do this, cause we know this market and people in business know us.

That's why we are not in a hurry. We will prepare everything according to laws and guidelines.

It's very hard to trust a project with this nature of business.
This entails a lot of legal documents as a proof that they are running a totally legit operation.
If you are just a small time investor, your participation here is more than likely in trading only.
If you want to ship your gold/diamond share, needs so much documentation that you will end up deciding not to get it anymore.
So most of the time, this kind of business, working with precious metals is just to entice investors but there's more than meets the eye here.

GID Coin has been listed on CoinRating, Check out their profile here: GID Coin on CoinRating.co

Thank you! Welcome to the GID Family!

 Great project,,good job team

Something about Stablecoin P.4

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Stablecoins May Be The Basis For Crypto Adoption
In the course of a week — or even a day — the crypto market value can swing wildly to the tune of billions of dollars. Giving cryptocurrency some sort of stable value is a priority for many developers and on Wednesday, Basis joined a growing list of stablecoins, announcing it had raised over $133m through a private placement from venture capital (VC) funds. They included top investors such as Bain, Google Ventures and LightSpeed, an American VC firm with a specialisation in the tech space.
Unlike most other cryptocurrencies, Basis is a stablecoin: a crypto “store of value” asset with a consistent value.
Basis has created a price-stable coin through the use of monetary controls. Similar to how central banks control fiat currency, Basis can either expand or contract the supply of coins in order to stop prices rising too high or too low.
According to its white paper, it will do this by either releasing more coins into the circulating supply or alternatively buying back more Basis coins to maintain a stable price. While we’ll leave an assessment of the Basis project to another day, the level of investment is significant for what some in the industry have described as a “boring” niche in the crypto space.
The question for these speculators, of course, is — why bother? What does a stablecoin offer in a market full of excitement like crypto? And the answer is simple. Stablecoins offer merchants the confidence to begin pricing their goods and services in digital assets.
Why Stablecoins Make Sense In Crypto
Although speculation on cryptocurrency price fluctuations has made some people a lot of money, it nonetheless makes it nearly impossible to use as an actual currency: goods and services would have to be repriced on a daily, if not hourly, basis; the value of hard-earned wages could evaporate in a matter of weeks; the prediction of future prices would completely determine corporate and household spending patterns.
Not only does it inhibit integration into the mainstream, but according to key industry figures, the fact that Bitcoin can be $6,000 today and $10,000 tomorrow has attracted speculators keen on making a quick profit, but not so interested in the technology behind it.
In a blog post last week, IOTA’s co-founder, Dominik Scheiner said speculation on price volatility was distracting the sector away from innovation and development and in an email to Crypto Briefing, the chairman of the Cardano Foundation, Michael Parsons, said:
Stablecoins might hold the answer towards addressing many of the price problems that are currently impinging on integrating cryptocurrency into the mainstream.
Although in the context of cryptocurrency, $133m might not be that much, the fact it comes from well-known VC firms suggests confidence in the future for stablecoins.
“Stablecoins are critical to the long-term success of crypto,” said David Prais from CoFound.it, a blockchain accelerator platform.
“As institutions come into the market, they will be taking positions in specific altcoins. When they transfer out of those specific coins they will absolutely want to use the stable coins to lessen their risk in comparison to Bitcoin or Ether. So as we move forward these coins will become critical to both the institutional markets but also sensible long-term traders.”
Other solutions, such as the recently-launched Havven — the most successful Australian ICO to date — have proposed creating a decentralised payment network, which uses a stablecoin (Nomins) pegged to local fiat currency to combat volatility.
Of course, stable coins are not exactly new — Tether (USDT), the granddaddy of the concept, has been around since 2014. The idea behind Tether was to create price stability by pegging it to the US dollar, a currency that because of its global importance has a relatively consistent price.
However, Tether has had some ‘issues’ surrounding its transparency that have caused many investors to doubt the fiat currency that supposedly backs it.
Claiming that each USDT is released for every dollar held, Tether has failed to prove that their fiat reserves match the total value of circulating USDT and in January, announced it had “dissolved” its relationship with the audit firm, Friedman LLP.
What Is Stopping Merchants From Accepting Cryptocurrency?
Establishing basic, predictable prices for cryptocurrency is the next step crucial for mainstream use. If Bitcoin or Ether were adopted tomorrow, then whole teams of people would have to constantly update the prices on all the items in stores as prices fluctuated.
While there may be an argument to suggest that emerging technologies built around RFID could potentially change pricing on-the-fly, few companies are close to the level of sophistication necessary to incorporate this into their business models — Amazon and Walmart would likely be the closest, and neither has given any indication that liquid pricing is on the horizon.
And of course, the kind of volatile pricing that is engendered by current cryptocurrencies is anathema to consumers, too. When you want a pizza, you want to know what you’re paying for it. If it turns up to the door 20 minutes after a John McCaffee pizza pump, costing eight times what you intended to pay, you’re not likely to be a happy bunny. In fact, this is exactly why some companies — such as Steam — have discontinued offering Bitcoin as a payment method.
Beyond these merchant objections is an even bigger one: if cryptocurrency is meant to be inclusive, and yet the technology to deal with it can only be found in giant Western-based companies, how do emerging economies make use of them?
And indeed, even in the “real world”, it’s not something that cryptocurrency alone suffers from. In Venezuela, four-figure inflation is causing the price of items to rise daily and supermarkets in the capital, Caracas, to continually run out of food. That level of volatility brings economies to their knees… and even issuing your own government-backed cryptocurrency won’t help.
Creating a stable source of value is key to a healthy economy, crypto or otherwise, and stablecoins, which are direct solutions to price volatility, could be the answer.
By Paddy Baker

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Hey Community!
You are welcome for questions!
We are missing you!

Something about Stablecoin P.3

“Stablecoins” are trending, but they may ignore basic economics
“Pegging cryptocurrencies to “real” money could stabilize them — or ruin them entirely” by Mike Orcutt, June 7, 2018
Spend enough time investing in (or reading about) the cryptocurrency world, and it’s easy to become a bit jaded about the wild, unpredictable price swings that seem to come with the territory. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, say some blockchain developers. The trick, they argue, is to peg the price of a crypto-token to that of a fiat currency like the US dollar.
“Blasphemy! Heresy!” come the cries from the crypto-originalists, the hard core in the community who hopped on board this careening bandwagon in the conviction that cryptocurrencies were invented to replace fiat money, not coexist with it. And there is plenty of legitimate criticism to be leveled at “stablecoins.” Some say the concept as a whole simply isn’t viable. Nevertheless, of late it has drawn plenty of interest — and venture capital. So let’s investigate.
This piece first appeared in our twice-weekly newsletter, Chain Letter, which covers the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Sign up here — it’s free!
The schemes: The idea of a stablecoin is in fact several years old, and dollar-pegged tokens(for example, Tether and TrueUSD) are already available on some cryptocurrency exchanges. But the recent mania around initial coin offerings has seeded a new crop, giving rise to different approaches to building a stablecoin. These fall into three broad categories:
Back up the tokens with cash in a bank account. This is how Tether, the most popular dollar-pegged coin, works. That’s what they say, at least — the company hasn’t shown the public any proof that the more than 2.5 billion “USDT” tokens in circulation are all actually backed by dollars. Perhaps the well-funded startup Circle, which last month announced plans to develop a stablecoin fully backed by dollar reserves, will be more transparent. Either way, users of a system like this must trust a third party with their money.
Back up the tokens with other cryptocurrencies. Instead of using fiat money as collateral, why not use cryptocurrency? That eliminates the need to trust a third party, since it can be done on a blockchain. But it also introduces another source of volatility — so you risk getting a stablecoin that’s not very stable. One way to fix that is by “over-collateralizing”: users must first deposit a larger amount — $150 worth of ether, say, in return for $100 worth of a stablecoin. Ultimately, though, if the collateral currency crashes in price — always a threat in crypto-land — the pegged token would go with it.
Create an “algorithmic central bank.” This entails using software to increase and decrease the supply of the stable token to maintain its peg. The best example is a forthcoming project called Basis, which raised $133 million in April from several big-name Silicon Valley VC firms. Basis’s white paper (PDF) describes a system that relies on buying and selling additional tokens besides the stablecoin (which, for now at least, is also called a “basis”). If its price drops below $1, the blockchain will sell “bond tokens” to users for stablecoins worth less than a dollar and remove them from the system. The bond tokens are guaranteed to yield payouts of a full dollar once the stablecoin’s price returns to its peg.
Failing econ 101: Perhaps the most vocal critic of stablecoins is Preston Byrne, a founder and former COO of the early blockchain startup Monax. Byrne, who has written extensively about the topic, said in an e-mail to MIT Technology Review that developers of stablecoins fail to account for basic economic principles by assuming that they will always be able to “incentivize users of their systems to purchase their coins at an arbitrary price.” This “ignores that in all market-based exchange, price is determined by a meeting of the minds of a buyer and seller, not by an algorithm,” Byrne says. “All that is required for these systems to fail is for people not to buy the product.”

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Something about Stablecoin P.2

Here is another story about Stablecoin of Miles Snider.
Stablecoins have been one of my major areas of interest since I got involved in crypto. I first learned of Bitcoin when I was studying abroad in Argentina in 2014. At the time, Argentina was in the midst of a currency crisis that had resulted in widespread inflation, and Argentinian citizens were still reeling from a 2001 market crash that ended with the government freezing bank accounts for a year.
To combat hyperinflation, Argentinian citizens developed a thriving black market for US dollars. Citizens purchased US dollars legally, but their purchases were capped. People regularly exchanged pesos for dollars from black market vendors, literally stashing their savings in mattresses. When the government currency stopped serving their needs, people widely turned to other currencies. Amidst this crisis, certain features of Bitcoin had serious appeal. It was a currency that wasn’t controlled by any government, could easily be sent or transported internationally without interference, was easier to safeguard than physical dollars, and couldn’t be seized. The only problem was that Bitcoin wasn’t a safe hedge against fiat inflation because Bitcoin itself was too volatile.
The solution is a stablecoin. Stablecoins, in their most ideal form, are simply cryptocurrencies with stable value. They share all the features listed above that make Bitcoin so appealing, but don’t suffer from the same volatility, making them much more usable as a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account.
Stablecoins are one of the highest convexity opportunities in crypto. They aim to become global, fiat-free, digital cash, so the total addressable market (TAM) is simply that of all the money in the world: ~$90T. The opportunity for stablecoins is, intrinsically, the largest possible TAM. This vision is larger than that of Bitcoin itself. A fiat-free currency that’s price stable will challenge the legitimacy of weak governments around the world.
You might wonder, how can one profit from a system whose final product is intrinsically a price-stable asset? All of the trustless stablecoins described below have some sort of associated equity-like token, which yields cash flows from the stable functioning of the system.
At a high level, a trustless, fiat-free stablecoin sounds impossible. How can a free-floating currency remain price stable given the natural ebbs and flows of supply and demand? The concept, on the surface, appears to violate basic economic principles. Despite the perceived challenges, many teams are attempting to create stablecoins.
I contend that there are four features that a cryptocurrency needs in order to become global, fiat-free, digital cash:
Price stability
Scalability
Privacy
Decentralization (i.e. collateral is not held by a single entity, like Tether)
None of the current stablecoin projects have all of these features, but some are aiming to offer all of these. Scalability and privacy are likely further out. But stable, decentralized cryptoassets are possible today.
There are three fundamental approaches to designing stablecoins: centralized IOU issuance, collateral backed, and seigniorage shares. I’ll examine each below.
Stablecoin Model #1: Centralized IOU Issuance
The first is to issue IOUs. This is the model used by tokens like Tether and Digix. Here, a centralized company holds assets in a bank account or vault and issues tokens that represent a claim on the underlying assets. The digital token has value because it represents a claim on another asset with some defined value. The problem with this approach is that it is centralized. These tokens require trust in the issuing party– that they actually own the assets being represented and that they are willing to honor the IOUs. This model imposes serious counterparty risk on holders of the token. Tether is the canonical example given the serious concerns that the public has about their solvency and legitimacy.
Stablecoin Model #2: Collateral Backed
The second approach is to create stablecoins that are backed by other trustless assets on-chain. This model was pioneered by BitShares. It’s also the model used by Maker, Havven, and others (see table below). In this model, the collateral backing the stablecoin is itself a decentralized cryptoasset. In the case of Maker, for example, Maker’s Dai stablecoin is backed by ETH held as collateral in an Ethereum smart contract. This approach has the benefit of being decentralized. The collateral is held trustlessly in a smart contract, so users aren’t relying on any third party to redeem it.
In short, this approach allows users to create stablecoins by locking up collateral in excess of the amount of stablecoins created. For example, a Maker user could generate $100 worth of Dai stablecoins by locking up $150 worth of Ether. The collateral is held in a smart contract, where it can be accessed by paying back the stablecoin debt, or can be automatically sold by the contract software if the collateral falls below a certain threshold. This allows for collateral-backed stablecoins that don’t require trust in a central party.
The problem, of course, is that the collateral backing the stablecoin is often a volatile cryptoasset such as BTS or ETH. If the value of this asset drops too quickly, the stablecoins issued could become undercollateralized. For this reason, most of the projects using this model require that the stablecoins be overcollateralized enough to protect against sharp price movements. While this can provide some degree of certainty, there always exists the possibility of a black swan event that causes collateral prices to drop so quickly that the stablecoins are undercollateralized. Projects using on-chain collateral have different approaches for handling black swan events.
Stablecoin Model #3: Seigniorage Shares
The final approach is the seigniorage shares approach, which algorithmically expands and contracts the supply of the price-stable currency much like a central bank does with fiat currencies. These stablecoins are not actually “backed” by anything other than the expectation that they will retain a certain value.
In this model, some initial allocation of stablecoin tokens is created. They are pegged to some asset such as USD. As total demand for the stablecoin increases or decreases, the supply automatically changes in response. While different projects use different methods to expand and contract the stablecoin supply, the most commonly used is the “bonds and shares” method introduced by Basecoin.
As the network grows, so too does demand for the stablecoins. Given fixed supply, an increase in demand will cause the price to increase. In the seigniorage shares model, however, increased demand causes the system to issue new stablecoins, thus increasing supply, and ultimately lowering price to the target level. This works conversely, using “bonds” to remove coins from circulation (more details below).
The major challenge of seigniorage shares is figuring out how to increase and decrease the monetary supply in a way that is both decentralized, resilient, and un-gameable. Expanding the money supply is easy: print money! Contracting the money supply, on the other hand, is not. Who loses money? Is it forced, or voluntary? If voluntary, what motivation does the person have to part ways with her stablecoin?
When the supply must contract, the system issues bonds with a par value of $1 that are sold at some discount to incentivize holders to remove stablecoins from circulation. Users purchase bonds (which may pay out at some future date) using stablecoins, thus removing some stablecoins from the supply. This creates a mechanism to decrease supply in the event that the price of the stablecoin falls below the target range. At some point in the future, if demand increases such that the system needs to increase the money supply, it first pays out bond holders (in the order that the bonds were purchased). If all of the bond holders have been paid out, then the software pays those who own shares (the equity token of the system). Shares represent a claim on future stablecoin distributions as demand increases. Shares can be thought of much like equity in that both shareholders and equity holders can value their asset as a function of expected dividends of holding the asset. Additionally, in most seigniorage shares implementations, shareholders are offered voting rights.
With the seigniorage shares model, supply never actually contracts with finality. Instead, each contraction involves the promise of a future increase in total supply. We’ve provided a basic overview of these mechanics, with some example estimates, at this link. Basecoin attempts to solve the contraction problem by allowing bonds to expire after five years. These instruments are not actually bonds– they are binary options with an indefinite payout date. This means that buyers will likely demand higher interest rates to account for this risk. One issue this creates is that a rapid decrease in demand can lead to a death spiral in the price of bonds. As the system begins printing new bonds in order to take stablecoins out of the supply, the bond queue becomes increasingly large. This increases the time to payout and decreases the likelihood that each bond is paid. As such, the newly printed bonds must be sold for a cheaper price in order to account for the additional risk. As bond prices fall, the number of stablecoins taken out of circulation for each bond sold also falls. This causes the system to have to print more bonds in order to shrink the supply sufficiently. This creates a recursive feedback loop that could make large-scale supply contraction near impossible unless other measures are put in place to prevent it. The Basecoin FAQ asserts that the system is immune to death spirals and explains their methods for preventing them, which include bond expiration and a bond price floor.
Some projects like Carbon modify the seigniorage shares model. In Carbon, users can elect to freeze portions of their funds to manage contraction and growth cycles. Some projects issue bonds, but simply pay out new stablecoins to all users, pro rata, when all bonds have been paid and supply must increase still. Each approach to the seigniorage shares model has its own set of challenges.
The seigniorage shares model is the most exciting, most experimental, and most “crypto-native” approach to creating a trustless decentralized stablecoin. There are many economists who believe it cannot work. Indeed, it’s fundamentally predicated on perpetual growth of the stablecoin system.
This fluctuating supply concept, while foreign at first, is rooted in a well known theory of economics: the Quantity Theory of Money. It’s also the method used by the Federal Reserve to maintain the stability of the US dollar. The crypto projects adopting the seigniorage shares model are attempting to do what the Federal Reserve does in a decentralized, algorithmic way.
Oracles
All stablecoins must address the oracle problem. If stablecoins are pegged to the value of some external asset like the US dollar, the system needs some way to get data about the exchange rate between the stablecoin and the asset that it is pegged to. There are three fundamental approaches to this problem.
Use a trusted data source (aka a trusted oracle).
This re-centralizes trust in the system on the oracle.
Data sources can be manipulated.
Use a set of delegated data feeds and take the median.
This is the approach used by BitShares. Users use stake-weighted voting to elect delegates to provide price feeds.
The median of the price feed is used, meaning a majority of the delegates would have to collude to manipulate the price feed.
The software can set limits on how much the price feed can move in certain time frames.
Delegates can be voted out for providing faulty data.
Use a schelling point scheme.
Users who stake tokens are able to provide price inputs. Votes are weighted by the amount of tokens staked.
The software sorts the values input by users. Users who provided an answer between the 25th and 75th percentile are rewarded, while users who submitted answers below the 25th percentile and above the 75th percentile are slashed (and their tokens redistributed to those who answered correctly).
This approaches uses game theory to make the optimal input the one that most accurately reflects reality.
Challenges
The final two challenges facing all stablecoins (most of which haven’t launched yet) are scalability and privacy. Global digital cash must be fast, cheap, and private. That can only occur if the platform it is built upon can scale. It must also be private, for both philosophical and practical reasons. A decentralized stablecoin could never serve as global, digital cash without some guarantee of privacy. While many people don’t immediately think that they care about privacy, businesses, governments, and financial institutions that transact in the stablecoin would certainly need privacy guarantees to protect their business interests, relationships, and more. A completely transparent ledger like that of Bitcoin is not usable for these purposes. Even though Bitcoin addresses are pseudonymous, simple chain analysis can link addresses with known entities with a fair degree of certainty. This traceability also destroys fungibility, an essential feature of digital cash.
One of the other challenges facing stablecoins is that they all are designed to be “pegged” to some underlying asset, usually USD. The problem is that people generally assume this to mean that the stablecoin is perfectly fungible for USD, when in fact it really means that the stablecoins are designed such that their value generally converges around the price of USD. Even stablecoins that are fully backed by and redeemable for collateral may not always trade at the peg, depending on market dynamics (accounting for counterparty risk). In order for stablecoins to succeed, users must view stablecoins not as fungible to the pegged asset, but as their own free-floating assets that very closely track the value of USD through a combination of redeemable collateral, market incentives, and future expectations. It is entirely possible that stablecoins could provide the desired stability without maintaining a perfect peg. In fact, once economies develop around the stablecoin itself, the peg will begin to matter less and less. If merchants are willing to hold and accept USD-pegged stablecoins, and they in turn pay their suppliers in the same stablecoin, and that stablecoin is widely used as a medium of exchange, then maintaining a perfect peg becomes increasingly less important.
Getting to that future state, however, requires a long process of bootstrapping such a network into existence and getting people to collectively believe that such a stablecoin is sound money. This process will be arduous, and will likely be even more difficult for seigniorage shares-based stablecoins that are not actually “backed” by anything.
Conclusion
While decentralized stablecoins are highly experimental, a successful implementation could be a major catalyst for fundamental long-term changes in the global economy. Lack of price stability prevents cryptocurrencies from displacing most forms of fiat money, and stablecoins can provide the solution. The decoupling of governments and money could provide an end to hyperinflationary policies, economic controls, and other damaging policies that result from government mismanagement of national economies.
Furthermore, stablecoins open up all sorts of possibilities for decentralized applications, especially those that require long-term lockups or escrow mechanisms. Decentralized insurance, prediction markets, savings accounts, decentralized exchange trading pairs, credit and debt markets, remittances, and more are all much more viable with the inclusion of a stablecoin.
While there are different approaches to creating a decentralized stablecoin, ultimately the market will decide which one will emerge the winner.

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Something about Stablecoin P.1

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As you know, we creating GID Coin as Stablecoin, so you need to know how it operates.
I want you to read an article of Haseeb Qureshi about Stablecoins.
Here is it:
A useful currency should be a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies excel at the first, but as a store of value or unit of account, they’re pretty bad. You cannot be an effective store of value if your price fluctuates by 20% on a normal day.
This is where stablecoins come in. Stablecoins are price-stable cryptocurrencies, meaning the market price of a stablecoin is pegged to another stable asset, like the US dollar.
It might not be obvious why we’d want this.

The Holy Grail of Crypto
Bitcoin and Ether are the two dominant cryptocurrencies, but their prices are volatile. A cryptocurrency’s volatility may fuel speculation, but in the long run, it hinders real-world adoption.
Businesses and consumers don’t want to be exposed to unnecessary currency risk when transacting in cryptocurrencies. You can’t pay someone a salary in Bitcoin if the purchasing power of their wages keeps fluctuating. Cryptocurrency volatility also precludes blockchain-based loans, derivatives, prediction markets, and other longer-term smart contracts that require price stability.
And of course, there’s the long tail of users who don’t want to speculate. They just want a store of value on a censorship-resistant ledger, escaping the local banking system, currency controls, or a collapsing economy. Right now, Bitcoin and Ethereum can’t offer them that.
The idea of a price-stable cryptocurrency has been in the air for a long time. Much cryptocurrency innovation and adoption has been bottlenecked around price-stability. For this reason, building a “stablecoin” has long been considered the Holy Grail of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
But how does one design a stablecoin? To answer that question, we first have to deeply understand what it means for an asset to be price-stable.

The price of stability
All stablecoins imply a peg. Stablecoins generally peg to the US dollar (so each stablecoin trades at $1), but they sometimes peg to other major currencies or to the consumer price index.
Of course, you can’t just decide an asset should be valued at a certain price. To paraphrase Preston Byrne: a stablecoin claims to be an asset that prices itself, rather than an asset that is priced by supply and demand.
This goes against everything we know about how markets work.
This is not to say that stablecoins are impossible. Stablecoins are just currency pegs, and currency pegs are certainly not impossible — there are many currency pegs still being maintained. However, almost all large central banks have moved away from currency pegs. This is in part because they’ve realized pegs tend to be inflexible and difficult to maintain. History has taught us again and again, whether it be Mexican peso crisis of 1994, the Ruble crisis of 1998, or the infamous Black Wednesday (when George Soros “broke the bank of England”), no currency peg can be maintained against sufficiently adverse conditions.
But this is an incomplete analysis.


The reality is, any peg can be maintained, but only within a certain band of market behavior. For different pegs the band might be wider than others. But it’s straightforwardly true that within at least some market conditions, it’s possible to maintain a peg. The question for each pegging mechanism is: how wide is the band of behavior it can support?
If you assume currency markets are performing a random walk, this implies every peg will eventually walk outside of its stable band and break. But the sun will also eventually swallow up the solar system, so screw it — we can call a peg stable if it lasts 20 years. Even in fiat years, that’s pretty good.
The question for any peg then is four-fold:
How much volatility can this peg withstand? (Namely, downward selling pressure)
How expensive is it to maintain the peg?
How easy is it to analyze the band of behavior from which it can recover?
How transparently can traders observe the true market conditions?
The final two points matter a great deal, because currency pegs are all about Schelling points. If market participants cannot identify when a peg is objectively weak, it becomes easy to spread false news or incite a market panic, which can trigger further selling — basically, a death spiral. A transparent peg is more robust to manipulation or sentiment swings.
To summarize, an ideal stablecoin should be able to withstand a great deal of market volatility, should not be extremely costly to maintain, should have easy to analyze stability parameters, and should be transparent to traders and arbitrageurs. These features maximize its real-world stability.
These are the dimensions along which I’ll analyze different stablecoin schemes.
So how can you design a stablecoin?

The types of stablecoins
The more stablecoin schemes I’ve examined, the more I’ve realized how small the space of possible designs actually is. Most schemes are slight variations of one another, and there are only a few fundamental models that actually work.

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At a high level, the taxonomy of stablecoins includes three families: fiat-collateralized coins, crypto-collateralized coins, and non-collateralized coins. We’ll analyze each in turn.

Fiat-collateralized stablecoins

If you want to build a stablecoin, it’s best to start with the obvious. Just create a cryptocurrency that’s literally an IOU, redeemable for $1.
You deposit dollars into a bank account and issue stablecoins 1:1 against those dollars. When a user wants to liquidate their stablecoins back into USD, you destroy their stablecoins and wire them the USD. This asset should definitely trade at $1 — it is less a peg than just a digital representation of a dollar.
This is the simplest scheme for a stablecoin. It requires centralization in that you have to trust the custodian, so the custodian must be trustworthy. You’ll also want auditors to periodically audit the custodian, which can be expensive.
But with that centralization comes the greatest price-robustness. This scheme can withstand any cryptocurrency volatility, because all of the collateral is held in fiat reserves and will remain intact in the event of a crypto collapse. This cannot be said for any other type of stablecoin.
A fiat-backed scheme is also highly regulated and constrained by legacy payment rails. If you want to exit the stablecoin and get your fiat back out, you’ll need to wire money or mail checks — a slow and expensive process.
Pros:
100% price-stable
Simplest (a big virtue!)
Less vulnerable to hacks, since no collateral is held on the blockchain
Cons:
Centralized — need a trusted custodian to store the fiat (otherwise vulnerable to brick and mortar theft)
Expensive and slow liquidation into fiat
Highly regulated
Need regular audits to ensure transparency
This is essentially what Tether purports to be, though they have not been recently audited and many people suspect Tether is actually a fractional reserve and don’t hold all of the fiat as they claim they do. Other stablecoins like TrueUSD are trying to do the same thing, but with more transparency. Digix Gold is a similar scheme, except the collateral is gold instead of fiat. Nevertheless, it shares the same fundamental properties.

Crypto-collateralized stablecoins

Say we don’t want to integrate with the traditional payment rails. After all, this is crypto-land! We just reinvented money, why go back to centralized banks and state-backed currencies?
If we move away from fiat, we can also remove the centralization from the stablecoin. The idea falls out naturally: let’s do the same thing, but instead of USD, let’s back the coin with reserves of another cryptocurrency. That way everything can be on the blockchain. No fiat required.
But wait. Cryptocurrencies are unstable, which means your collateral will fluctuate. But a stablecoin obviously shouldn’t fluctuate in value. There’s only one way to resolve this catch-22: over-collateralize the stablecoin so it can absorb price fluctuations in the collateral.
Say we deposit $200 worth of Ether and then issue 100 $1 stablecoins against it. The stablecoins are now 200% collateralized. This means the price of Ether can drop by 25%, and our stablecoins will still be safely collateralized by $150 of Ether, and can still be valued at $1 each. We can liquidate them now if we choose, giving $100 in Ether to the owner of the stablecoins, and the remaining $50 in Ether back to the original depositor.
But why would anyone want to lock up $200 of Ether to create some stablecoins? There are two incentives you can use here: first, you could pay the issuer interest, which some schemes do. Alternatively, the issuer could choose to create the extra stablecoins as a form of leverage. This is a little subtle, but here’s how it works: if a depositor locks up $200 of Ether, they can create $100 of stablecoins. If they use the 100 stablecoins to buy another $100 of Ether, they now have a leveraged position of $300 Ether, backed by $200 in collateral. If Ether goes up 2x, they now have $600, instead of the $400 they’d otherwise make.
Fundamentally, all crypto-collateralized stablecoins use some variant of this scheme. You over-collateralize the coin using another cryptocurrency, and if the price drops enough, the stablecoins get liquidated. All of this can be managed by the blockchain in a decentralized way.
We neglected one critical detail though: the stablecoin has to know the current USD/ETH price. But blockchains are unable to access any data from the external world. So how you can you know the current price?
The first way is to simply have someone continually publish a price feed onto the blockchain. This is obviously vulnerable to manipulation, but this may be good enough if the publisher is trustworthy. The second way is to use a Schelling Coin scheme, along the lines of TruthCoin. This is much more complex and requires a lot of coordination, but is ultimately less centralized and less manipulable.
Crypto-collateralized coins are a cool idea, but they have several major disadvantages. Crypto-collateralized coins are more vulnerable to price instability than fiat-collateralized coins. They also have the very unintuitive property that they can be spontaneously destroyed.
If you collateralize your coin with Ether and Ether crashes hard enough, then your stablecoin will automatically get liquidated into Ether. At that point you’ll be exposed to normal currency risk, and Ether may continue to fall. This could be a dealbreaker for exchanges — in the case of a market crash, they would have to deal with stablecoin balances and trading pairs suddenly mutating into the underlying crypto assets.
The only way to prevent this is to over-collateralize to the hilt, which makes crypto-collateralized coins much more capital-intensive than their fiat counterparts. A fiat-backed cryptocurrency will require only 100K collateral to issue 100K stablecoins, whereas a crypto-collateralized coin might require 200K collateral or more to issue the same number of coins.

More decentralized
Can liquidate quickly and cheaply into underlying crypto collateral (just a blockchain transaction)
Very transparent — easy for everyone to inspect the collateralization ratio of the stablecoin
Can be used to create leverage
Cons:
Can be auto-liquidated during a price crash into underlying collateral
Less price stable than fiat
Tied to the health of a particular cryptocurrency (or basket of cryptocurrencies)
Inefficient use of capital
Most complexity
The first stablecoin to use this scheme was BitUSD (collateralized with BitShares), created by Dan Larimer back in 2013. Since then, MakerDAO’s Dai is widely considered the most promising crypto-collateralized stablecoin, collateralized by Ether. An interesting scheme proposed by Vitalik Buterin is using CDOs to issue stablecoins against loans with different tranches of seniority (the most senior tranches could act as stablecoins).

Non-collateralized stablecoins
As you get deeper into crypto-land, eventually you have to ask the question: how sure are we that we actually need collateral to begin with? After all, isn’t a stablecoin just a coordination game? Arbitrageurs just have to believe that our coin will eventually trade at $1. The United States was able to move off the gold standard and is no longer backed by any underlying asset. Perhaps this means collateral is unnecessary, and a stablecoin could adopt the same model.
This idea is not completely novel — its roots can be traced to arguments made by F.A. Hayek in the 70s. A privately issued, non-collateralized, price-stable currency could pose a radical challenge to the dominance of fiat currencies. But how would you ensure it remains stable?
Enter Seignorage Shares, a scheme invented by Robert Sams in 2014. Seignorage Shares is based on a simple idea. What if you model a smart contract as a central bank? The smart contract’s monetary policy would have only one mandate: issue a currency that will trade at $1.
Okay, but how could you ensure the currency’s trading price? Simple — you’re issuing the currency, so you get to control the monetary supply.
For example, let’s say the coin is trading at $2. This means the price is too high — or put another way, the supply is too low. To counteract this, the smart contract can mint new coins and then auction them on the open market, increasing supply until the price returns to $1. This would leave the smart contract with some extra profits. Historically, when governments minted new money to finance their operations, the profits were called the seignorage.
But what if the coin is trading too low? Let’s say it’s trading at $0.50. You can’t un-issue circulating money, so how can you decrease the supply? There’s only one way to do it: buy up coins on the market to reduce the circulating supply. But what if the seignorage you’ve saved up is insufficient to buy up enough coins?
Seignorage Shares says: okay, instead of giving out my seignorage, I’m going to issue shares that entitle you to future seignorage. The next time I issue new coins and earn seignorage, shareholders will be entitled to a share of those future profits!
In other words, even if the smart contract doesn’t have the cash to pay me now, because I expect the demand for the stablecoin to grow over time, eventually it will earn more seignorage and be able to pay out all of its shareholders. This allows the supply to decrease, and the coin to re-stabilize to $1.
This is the core idea behind Seignorage Shares, and some version of this undergirds most non-collateralized stablecoins.
If you think Seignorage Shares sounds too crazy to work, you’re not alone. Many have criticized this system for an obvious reason: it resembles a pyramid scheme. Low coin prices are buttressed by issuing promises of future growth. That growth must be subsidized by new entrants buying into the scheme. Fundamentally, you could say that the “collateral” backing Seignorage Shares is shares in the future growth of the system.
Clearly this means that in the limit, if the system doesn’t eventually continue growing, it will not be able to maintain its peg.
Perhaps that’s not an unreasonable assumption though. After all, the monetary base for most world currencies have experienced nearly monotonic growth for the last several decades. It’s possible that a stable cryptocurrency might experience similar growth.


But there’s no free lunch in economics. Seignorage Shares can absorb some amount of downward pressure for a time, but if the selling pressure is sustained for long enough, traders will lose confidence that shares will eventually pay out. This will further push down the price and trigger a death spiral.
The most dangerous part of this system is that it’s difficult to analyze. How much downward pressure can the system take? How long can it withstand that pressure? Will whales or insiders prop up the system if it starts slipping? At what point should we expect them intervene? When is the point of no return when the system breaks? It’s hard to know, and market participants are unlikely to converge. This makes the system is susceptible to panics and sentiment-based swings.
Non-collateralized stablecoins are also vulnerable to a secular decline in demand for crypto, since such a decline would inevitably inhibit growth. And in the event of a crypto crash, traders tend to exit to fiat currencies, not stablecoins.
These systems also need significant bootstrapping of liquidity early on until they can achieve healthy equilibrium. But ultimately, these schemes capitalize on a key insight: a stablecoin is, in the end, a Schelling point. If enough people believe that the system will survive, that belief can lead to a virtuous cycle that ensures its survival.
With all that said, non-collateralized stablecoins are the most ambitious design. A non-collateralized coin is independent from all other currencies. Even if the US Dollar and Ether collapse, a non-collateralized coin could survive them as a stable store of value. Unlike the central banks of nation states, a non-collateralized stablecoin would not have perverse incentives to inflate or deflate the currency. Its algorithm would only have one global mandate: stability.
This is an exciting possibility, and if it succeeds, a non-collateralized stablecoin could radically change the world. But if it fails, that failure could be even more catastrophic, as there would be no collateral to liquidate the coin back into and the coin would almost certainly crash to zero.

No collateral required
Most decentralized and independent (not tied to any other cryptocurrency or to fiat)
Cons:
- Requires continual growth
- Most vulnerable to crypto decline or crash, and cannot be liquidated in a crash
- Difficult to analyze safety bounds or health
- Some complexity

The most promising project in this category is Basecoin, which builds upon Seignorage Shares by adding a first-in-first-out “bond” queue. They claim that this addition improves the stability properties of the protocol, and have performed several simulations to model various outcomes.

The ideal stablecoin
Stablecoins are critical to the future of crypto. The differences between these designs are subtle, yet matter immensely.
But after having looked at many of these, my primary conclusion is that there is no ideal stablecoin. Like with most technologies, the best we can do is choose the set of tradeoffs that we’re willing to accept for a given application and risk profile.

The best outcome then, is not to try to pick winners early, but rather to encourage the many stablecoin experiments to bear their fruit in the marketplace.
If crypto has taught us anything, it’s that it’s very hard to predict the future. I suspect there are many more variations on these schemes waiting to be unearthed. But whichever stablecoins win in the long run, they’ll almost certainly build on one of these fundamental designs.

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Hey Community!
We are starting the series of articles, which describes Stable Coin.
All articles got from public sources.

Diamond Market overview
JCK show sees fewer participants, but trading reflects healthy US market. Big jewelry brands and top-tier independents adjusting to dynamic retail environment and enjoying 2018 growth. Suppliers maintaining stable prices, with 1 ct. RAPI -0.2% in May. De Beers’ entry into lab-grown diamonds dominates discussions at the show, with industry largely supporting the move to disrupt the synthetics market. Forevermark unveils omni-channel strategy with online sales platform. DPA to launch China campaign in July, shifts US focus to female self-purchasers. Signet 1Q sales +6% to $1.5B, loss of $497M vs. profit of $79M last year. Chow Tai Fook FY sales +15% to $7.5B, profit +33% to $536M.
 
Fancies: Fancy shapes mixed, with curves better than squares. Ovals hot, followed by Emeralds, Pears and Cushions. Marquises and Princesses weak. Oversizes selling well. Steady demand for fine-quality 6 to 10 ct. Ovals, Pears and Emeralds, with limited supply. US supporting market for commercial-quality, medium-priced fancies under 1 ct. Far East demand improving as consumers seek fancy shapes at better prices. Off-make, poorly cut fancies illiquid and hard to sell, even at very deep discounts.
 
United States: Positive sentiment continues through Las Vegas shows. Buyers looking for specific items in loose diamonds, while retailers planning fall and holiday season collections. Steady demand for round, 0.50 to 1.25 ct., G-I, SI diamonds. VVS weak. Fancy shapes selling well, particularly Ovals and Emeralds.
 
Belgium: Antwerp trading slightly quieter, with many dealers at Las Vegas fairs. Good demand for 1 ct., G-J, VS-SI, RapSpec A3+ diamonds. Buyers looking at price points and avoiding inventory buildup. Polished exports up in 2018, with US and Hong Kong fueling growth. Rough trading stable ahead of next week’s Alrosa sale.
 
Israel: Dealers upbeat about US market following JCK show. Steady interest in 0.75 to 1.25 ct., G-J, VS-SI diamonds. Shortage of RapSpec A2+ diamonds supporting prices. Emeralds, Ovals and Pears driving fancy shapes. Rough trading slow.
 
India: Activity relatively low as May summer break ends and dealers return from Las Vegas. Inventory levels rising, with steady polished manufacturing. Solid demand for dossiers, melee slightly weak. Cutters concerned about tight profit margins.
 
Hong Kong: Diamond trading quiet, with dealers interested in Las Vegas feedback. Suppliers preparing for Hong Kong show (June 21 to 24), the smallest of the municipality’s three annual fairs. Hong Kong and mainland China retail environment improving. Chow Tai Fook notes changing consumer preferences due to rise of middle class and millennials as well as increased urbanization.
by Rapaport

Meet our Partners — LBMA. Gold Market Overview
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Internationally, bullion is traded on a 24-hour basis, mainly through London, in Over-the-Counter (OTC) transactions in spot, forwards and options.
The governance of this market is maintained through the London Bullion Market Association’s (LBMA) publication of the Good Delivery List. This is the list of accredited refiners, whose standards of production and assaying meet the requirements set out in the LBMA’s Rules. Only bullion conforming to these standards is acceptable in settlement against transactions conducted between participants in the bullion market.
The world’s trade in bullion is London-based with a global reach of activity and participants. The roots of the London Bullion Market can be traced to the partnership between Moses Mocatta and the East India Company, who started shipping gold together towards the end of the 17th century.
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OTC Bullion Market
The pie diagram shows the five main elements which together comprise the London Over the Counter (OTC) Bullion Market. An OTC market provides flexibility in terms of pricing, size of deals and length of contract, and means that all transactions are conducted between two parties on a principal-to-principal basis. This maintains confidentiality but also ensures that all risks, including those of credit, exist only between the two counterparts.
The term Loco London refers to gold and silver bullion that is physically held in London. Only LBMA Good Delivery bars are acceptable for trading in the London market. Counterparties and their clients from all over the world settle their transactions through the London OTC market.
CLEARING SYSTEM
 All bullion transactions between the clearing members of the LBMA are settled and cleared by The London Precious Metals Clearing Limited.
VAULTING SERVICES
 Seven members of the LBMA, together with the Bank of England, physically hold the gold and silver bullion traded in London. They act as gatekeepers to the Market, ensuring the bullion traded and delivered meets the standards set by the LBMA.
GOOD DELIVERY
 The LBMA maintains the Good Delivery Lists for gold and silver bars. Only bars produced by refiners on the Lists can be traded in the London market. Both the refiners’ practices and the bars they produce have to measure up to the most stringent standards of quality.
PRICING AND STATISTICS
 LBMA Market Makers set continuous two-way bid and offer prices for bullion products. The LBMA Gold and Silver Prices are operated and administered by IBA, with the LBMA Platinum and Palladium Prices operated and administered by the London Metal Exchange (LME). These benchmark prices are used around the world as a basis for settling a variety of transactions. We also publish monthly data on gold and silver, both the amounts held in London vaults and settled in the daily clearing.
ALLOCATED AND UNALLOCATED ACCOUNTS
 Most traded and settled bullion in London is on an unallocated account basis. This is an account where the customer does not own specific bars, but has a general entitlement to an amount of metal. This is similar to the way that a bank account operates. Allocated accounts means that the customer has entitlement to specific bars.