Chain Chatter: Stablecoins

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1ZkJzjBNDgWJv

https://inleo.io/threads/view/khaleelkazi/re-leothreads-uvnj3ejq

Today was a day weird day!

I've been taking a more active and public roll with Hive and crypto in general. For today I agreed to "dox my voice" and speak with taskmaster4450, khal, theycallmedan, and anomadsoul in a Twitter space. If you're interested you can click the link above and hear for yourself.

Of course like 90% of all people on Earth I absolutely hate the sound of my own voice on recording. I can't even listing to my own recordings I just have to pretend they don't exist. Over here sounding like some Ben Shapiro twerp even though I'm 6 foot 3 and weigh over 200 pounds, lol. Sometimes I tell myself I should go full Elizabeth Holmes and purposefully deepen my voice, but inevitably conclude that being that self-conscious is simply too much work.

You know who has an impeccable voice for radio?
Edwin Boyette!
What a legend.
He also spoke briefly in this one.

In any case I'm not sure how much insight I actually bring to the table when it comes to these things. On a very real level I just kind of feel like I'm just repeating things I've already written on my blog. It's also just weird going from solo or one-on-one conversations to more of a public speaking type of environment with much larger social dynamics. Everyone else has a bit more experience with this than I do and the flow of the conversation is something I need to get used to for sure. All things being said I'll keep showing up if I keep getting invited. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new era!

Many topics were discussed but the main theme was stablecoins

What are stablecoins even for? Are they just a speculative asset in which we can park our assets and "take gains"? Is the goal to create circular economies and velocity? Should we be pursuing exchange listings? Is 20% APR unsustainable? All of these questions and more are answered in the recording.

At the end of the day stablecoins are a very controversial issue in crypto.

We'd certainly prefer if stablecoins did not exist. Plain and simple this is the ideal state: that at least one crypto rises up and creates its own stability without the need to piggyback off of a toxic legacy asset. Unfortunately this is simply not the reality we live in today. Stablecoins provide a very real and needed utility within economies that absolutely rely on the non-volatile value they provide.

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From here the only question is whether we'd prefer centralized coins backed by reserves or decentralized assets backed by algorithms and collateral. In my view all stablecoins are backed by reputation no matter their decentralization status. Tether is backed by the corporate entity that issues it. HBD is backed by the Hive network. Which one of those entities is more trustworthy?

This is actually not a rhetorical question. A centralized coin can easily be more trustworthy than a decentralized one. UST was decentralized. This decentralization did not fail. Just because something is decentralized does not necessarily imply it won't implode due to systemic risk.

There's also a question as to what we are using the token for. HBD is great for the current 20% yield but liquidity is currently dwarfed by all pretty much all other assets I could possibly think of. In fact there was even some drama on Twitter with a Bitcoiner named @lopp (whose Hive account I currently own) where he dismissed HBD completely just because it had low volume on centralized exchanges. Imagine that being the metric that assets are judged: how much people trade them on custodial exchanges. This is the logic that even hardcore Bitcoiners operate on.

Of course we all know that aggregated data does not take into account our internal market or people simply sending HBD from one account to another. And isn't that the entire point of crypto? To trade it peer to peer and create actual economies in which users are trading their services with each other?

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So which coins should exist and which shouldn't?

Ah well that's easy: they should all exist. All of these assets are creating utility for their users. Will they all survive through another bear market? That's another question entirely.

Borderless

One big point I brought up is that the borderless nature of stablecoins is a huge asset for a niche group of users. Transferring stables all over the world is easy. Transferring USD is not. It's interesting to note that stablecoins have access to all the benefits of crypto like DEFI and the permissionless nature of the ecosystem even though they are tied back to the legacy system.

DAI

One thing that wasn't talked about much was MakerDAO and the DAI stablecoin. Personally I've lost a lot of faith in this asset because USDC collateral is allowed. It's safe to say that if USDC fails than DAI will also fail, making it inherit the risks of all the allowed forms of collateral (including centrally wrapped Bitcoin).

Ending with a note of speculation.

My birthday came with a dump but we got the immediate V-shaped recovery right after when testing the 25 day moving average as support. Crypto is still looking very strong and hugely bullish. Choice altcoins like Rune and Solana are running completely wild. As long as that light blue line keeps going up and doesn't plateau we seem to be in pretty good shape. The plan is to close our longs (I'm trading with a friend of mine) in two weeks while we ride out the rest of November. I'm still thinking January will mark some kind of peak but there's no need to margin trade for that long because it's a bit greedy to begin with.

Conclusion

Will I show up to more public speaking events? Probably.
Hive and crypto are my life. This is my job. Time to step up and act like it.