What is happening right now that is causing the price to fall, what prevented it from falling over the last few years, and why isn't that thing preventing it from falling now?
Of course, this isn’t always the case, and with Tether, there has been much scrutiny over the years that they do not have the USD collateral to back their stablecoin.
Ok, but let’s assume Tether has the USD. Why is it depegging? This is most likely due to sell pressure and Tether’s ability to liquidate their USD holdings. I think Tether has more than enough real USD to deal with the sell pressure we’re seeing now, but the system is having a hard time keeping up.
Probably applies only to some, but still a real insane thing...
There is no collateral requirement. In UST/LUNA’s case they had collateral, mostly in Bitcoin, in the Luna Reserve Guard but their collateral proved insufficient. Some algorithmic stablecoins are entirely uncollateralized.
They will always swap a UST for $1 of LUNA so a UST is implicitly worth $1.
LUNA itself doesn’t have anything behind it though apart from concidence. So we have a stablecoin manufactured from a volatile unbacked asset where the market cap can fall arbitrarily low.
I know it failed, but it’s not quite clicking for me what they were even trying?
Even national governments struggle to do this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
Now, of course, if you decided to _not_ be open and _not_ hold your reserves in safe assets but instead decided to invest the reserves to speculative gambling tokens or shady commercial papers, then it really is difficult to keep the guarantee if the gambling token loses value.
A price is just an abstraction for the willingness to buy and sell. If you know there are 1000 of some token in the world, and you have 1000 of some item, you can guarantee that people will always be able to buy one item for one token - by selling your items to them at that price.
But of course, just holding the dollars makes it hard to profit.
I don't think the Black Wednesday situation is similar, because the UK was never going to be able to hold enough of the currencies it was supposedly pegged to to make that same promise. Definitely not my expertise there though!
It's "worth" whatever price the bid-ask spread meets at.
It's exchangeable for USD to the company. As long as there isn't a bank run where they'd stop fulfilling exchanges, when the price drops below $1 anyone can arbitrage it. It reached like 95 cents earlier, anyone could've bought millions of it and got USD for it at like 6% profit. It creates buy pressure/price support as the price falls.
What is currently happening is because of too much volume they have hard time putting more money back into the ecosystem (which is the good scenario, it means they have money but things are going just a bit slow), or they are running out of money (which is a bad scenario that would cause many things to go down with it).
"1. You wake up one morning and invent two crypto tokens.
2. One of them is the stablecoin, which I will call “Terra,” for reasons that will become apparent.
3. The other one is not the stablecoin. I will call it “Luna.”
4. To be clear, they are both just things you made up, just numbers on a ledger. (Probably the ledger is maintained on a decentralized blockchain, though in theory you could do this on your computer in Excel.)
5. You try to find people to buy them.
6. Luna will trade at some price determined by supply and demand. If you make it up on your computer and keep the list in Excel and smirk when you tell people about this, that price will be zero, and none of this will work.
7. But if you do a good job of marketing Luna, that price will not be zero. If the price is not zero then you’re in business.
8. You promise that people can always exchange one Terra for $1 worth of Luna. If Luna trades at $0.10, then one Terra will get you 10 Luna. If Luna trades at $20, then one Terra will get you 0.05 Luna. Doesn’t matter. The price of Luna is arbitrary, but one Terra always gets you $1 worth of Luna. (And vice versa: People can always exchange $1 worth of Luna for one Terra.)
9. You set up an automated smart contract — the “algorithm” in “algorithmic stablecoin” — to let people exchange their Terras for Lunas and Lunas for Terras.
10. Terra should trade at $1. If it trades above $1, people — arbitrageurs — can buy $1 worth of Luna for $1 and exchange them for one Terra worth more than a dollar, for an instant profit. If it trades below $1, people can buy one Terra for less than a dollar and exchange it for $1 worth of Luna, for an instant profit. These arbitrage trades push the price of Terra back to $1 if it ever goes higher or lower.
11. The price of Luna will fluctuate. Over time, as trust in this ecosystem grows, it will probably mostly go up. But that is not essential to the stablecoin concept. As long as Luna robustly has a non-zero value, you can exchange one Terra for some quantity of Luna that is worth $1, which means Terra should be worth $1, which means that its value should be stable.
All of this is, I think, quite straightforward and correct, except for Point 7, which is insane. If you overcome that — if you can find a way to make Luna worth some nonzero amount of money — then everything works fine. "
Also the price of a stablecoin can shift from it's peg, even if it has 100% backing, when there is latency/congestion/spread/volume for the arbitrage trade.
That said, there is a whole heap of plenty of evidence that USDT is not backed by dollars 1:1.
https://docs.terra.money/docs/develop/module-specifications/...
What if the oracle has downtime?
And what coins do is in effect marketing for all other coins. If one stablecoin crashes, trust in others will erode.
Their solution was to staple a HYIP scheme to the side of it-- a service where you can deposit coins and get a 20% annual return.
...
This made me genuinely laugh out loud! But not just because it's funny, but it's also the essence of all digital coinage.
How do you ensure you have enough Luna to maintain the exchange? If you hold enough Luna but then the price of Luna goes down, where do you get your extra Luna from? A run on your promise kills you.
The problem occurs when the amount of Luna that trades for $1 becomes undefined because nobody is willing to do the trade anymore.
In the long run you're right though. Eventually you run out of people who believe them and you get the events of the last few days.
The printing of luna when people sell terra should be offset by luna having been burned when the terra was printed. Ideally (when the price of luna is growing) then you print less luna at sale time than you burned earlier when the terra was printed. This decreases supply of luna, making luna worth more.
The people using Terra give up their returns to Luna holders for the convenience of a universally acceptable exchange medium that is pegged to something else of value that isn't universally acceptable.
As with all leveraged investments to problems occur when the underlying real assets fail to perform as expected. Or at worst don't exist at all.
The names are the cleverest part of the whole scheme.
To properly answer your question, Terra has no upside: no way to 10x. So yes, gambling.
The cash is less risky but it’s value does not change (apart from inflation).
Stocks are more risky but may give you profit over time.
There are 3 different things: Governance related, market module related, and staking related.
You can spend 50 LUNA to submit a governance proposal. The second is to stake your LUNA. When your LUNA is staked the first benefit is that you can vote on governance proposals. Proposals can be onchain changes such as modifying a parameter or an offchain change which people should respect even if there is nothing technically forcing them to follow it.
There is a limited amount of UST that exists so what happens if more people want UST? You can burn LUNA to mint new UST. In times where the demand for UST is strong enough to make UST go above $1 it may be profitable for someone to burn their LUNA to mint UST.
Every transaction has gas fees. Any swaps between stable coins have a tobin tax. Using the market module to exchange UST for LUNA has a spread fee. All of these fees are collected and then distributed to the stakers. To help protect against times when the protocol is less active the fees are actually spread out over time. Right now every 5 blocks 5/9400000 of the reward pool is paid out to people staking. 9400000 is how many blocks there are in 2 years.
Ah, the good old trust-less blockchain. Proved by maths, not by trust and decency and conventions like traditional finance.