Stablecoins Can Have Bank Runs | Hacker News Reader

Stablecoins Can Have Bank Runs

bloomberg.com

18 pointsioblomov18 comments

Speed running the last N centuries of banking regulation.

Makes you wonder if there will be a future FDIC equivalent, complete with single-business-day turnaround for receivership (idk if you've ever had your normal bank go under, but the fdic gets you access to your money like over the weekend, it's almost weirdly fast)

Reading this I had the odd thought that if US treasury bonds were non-fungible (eg that had serial numbers) you could somehow issue NFTs for them and use that to back a stable coin. People could redeem the coin for the bonds, and also directly see that there were enough of them. You would still need a custodian for the bonds, but that would be less risk.

This already exists; both Blackrock and Franklin Templeton have issued US treasury bonds on Ethereum[1], with over $1B issued so far.

1. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/03/28/over-1b-in-us-tr...

Similarly, if it were possible (and legal) to provably destroy a US Dollar bill with a specific serial number, you could use that to move value into a stablecoin. Light dollar bill on fire, record and publish a video of it burning (with serial number visible), receive a newly minted digital dollar. Unfortunately, deepfakes + 18 USC 333 make this ineffective + illegal.

A project like this existed long before deepfakes were possible. And they didn't care about legality (not that other crypto projects do).

BTW, instead of burning a dollar bill, have you tried spending it on buying $1 worth of electricity and wasting it on useless computation? Then you can use the invoice/receipt from your utility company as a proof of burn (PoB) ;)

Interesting - I wasn't aware of prior art here. Do you remember the project's name?

One issue with the power company receipt PoB proposal is that the dollar value isn't actually destroyed; the power company still becomes $1 richer, and could repeatedly recycle that dollar to burn more energy and mint more currency. In order to prevent runaway inflation, you'd want to decouple the amount of energy burnt from the amount of issued currency. What if you used the PoB receipts as lottery tickets, and every 10 minutes a winner is picked and receives a fixed amount (say, 50 units) of currency? :)

Plus, for a stable coin to work, you need to be able to redeem it at face value. If you burned the dollar bill... Hard to do!

Why destroy it, instead of custodying it with a bank, backed by their deposits at the Fed?

Elimination of unnecessary trusted third parties. Custodying it with a bank means trusting that bank to not misappropriate it. Destroying it means trusting physics and the irreversibility of entropy.

Just in case it's not a joke, I'll point out that "directly see" is the weak point in that scheme.

Please just have audits.

To my knowledge, every bankrun on a non-algorithmic stablecoin has resulted in huge losses for the panic sellers, huge gains for the steady hands, and no lasting liquidity issues for the stablecoin itself. Tether, Dai, USDC have all had bank runs at one point or another yet continue to trade at a dollar.

People can't do bank run if there are no redemptions allowed (wink wink) :)

Paywall... sigh

Fyi, you can sign up to get the column via email for free. You should, he is fantastic.

I'll give it a go, per your recommendation.

Nice, but please post the text here, because nobody can read this thru the paywall

I think the full article available via archive link here:

https://mattlevine.co/work

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