1. Introduction and context

Bitcoin was the first electronic peer-to-peer cash system implemented without the necessity of going through a financial institution.

From the Bitcoin Paper:

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this Paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes. ​[1]

The solution to the double-spending problem was successfully deployed, and by 2022, Bitcoin is still the largest blockchain with the highest Market Cap. The economic property that Satoshi decided to use to give value to bitcoin was scarcity and let the forces of demand and supply do their job. Today, there are 18.2M BTC in circulation; more than 85% of the total mined BTC will ever be available.

Bitcoin still shies under the EUR and USD currencies. The EUR and USD traded in the Forex Market are around 6 Trillion per day. The paper cash daily market worldwide should be about 20 Trillion USD. The max volume of BTC in one day hasn't reached 60 Billion.

As you can easily depict from this data, the potential market for a decentralized stable electronic peer-to-peer cash system solving the double-spending problem plus volatility without any financial institution intervention is still easily a 1Trillion Venture.

Tether and Ethereum started their development around the same time: 2014-2015. Tether saw the potential of a stable coin based on blockchain technology. From their White Paper, you can read this:

We believe the Bitcoin blockchain is a better technology for transacting, storing, and accounting for these assets. Most estimates measure global wealth around 250 trillion dollars, with much of that being held by banks or similar financial institutions. The migration of these assets onto the Bitcoin blockchain represents a proportionally large opportunity.

Bitcoin was created as "an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.". Bitcoin created a new class of digital currency, a decentralized digital currency or cryptocurrency1.

Some of the primary advantages of cryptocurrencies are: low transaction costs, international borderless transferability and convertibility, trustless ownership and exchange, pseudo anonymity, real time transparency, and immunity from legacy banking system problems. Common explanations for the current limited mainstream use of cryptocurrencies include: volatile price swings, inadequate mass market understanding of the technology, and insufficient ease of use for nontechnical users. ​[2]

Tether is still the largest stable coin traded, with a daily volume average of around 75 Billion by the end of 2021 and the ongoing 2022. The problem with Tether is that it is backed up by traditional bank accounts, which, in the end, relies on trusting conventional financial institutions. We believe it's a poor solution compared to the colossal accomplishments of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which we will talk about next.

Ethereum, as we mentioned before, was in its infancy when Tether was already being implemented using the Bitcoin Omni and Liquid Protocol. It was probably the best tech at the time, but Ethereum came along to be the first decentralized computer and surpass Bitcoin's tech by far. His founder, Vitalik Buterin, wrote:

What Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create "contracts" that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing users to create any of the systems described above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code. [​ 3]

They officially became the first successful decentralized world computer, and by today they hold the second-largest Crypto asset Market Cap. Today there are other projects on the hunt for Ethereum to conquer the Market with better tech and scalability. On the other hand, Vitalik saw a far more advanced way of solving a peer to peer cash system's volatility issue since the writings of his original Paper that hasn't come to the Market yet:

Financial derivatives and Stable-Value Currencies

Financial derivatives are the most common application of a "smart contract", and one of the simplest to implement in code. The main challenge in implementing financial contracts is that the majority of them require reference to an external price ticker; for example, a very desirable application is a smart contract that hedges against the volatility of ether (or another cryptocurrency) with respect to the US dollar, but doing this requires the contract to know what the value of ETH/USD is.

The simplest way to do this is through a "data feed" contract maintained by a specific party (eg. NASDAQ) designed so that that party has the ability to update the contract as needed, and providing an interface that allows other contracts to send a message to that contract and get back a response that provides the price.

Given that critical ingredient, the hedging contract would look as follows: Wait for party A to input 1000 ether. Wait for party B to input 1000 ether. Record the USD value of 1000 ether, calculated by querying the data feed contract, in storage, say this is $x.

After 30 days, allow A or B to "reactivate" the contract in order to send $x worth of ether (calculated by querying the data feed contract again to get the new price) to A and the rest to B.

Such a contract would have significant potential in crypto-commerce. One of the main problems cited about cryptocurrency is the fact that it's volatile; although many users and merchants may want the security and convenience of dealing with cryptographic assets, they may not wish to face that prospect of losing 23% of the value of their funds in a single day.

Up until now, the most commonly proposed solution has been issuer-backed assets; the idea is that an issuer creates a sub-currency in which they have the right to issue and revoke units, and provide one unit of the currency to anyone who provides them (offline) with one unit of a specified underlying asset (eg. gold, USD). The issuer then promises to provide one unit of the underlying asset to anyone who sends back one unit of the crypto-asset. This mechanism allows any non-cryptographic asset to be "uplifted" into a cryptographic asset, provided that the issuer can be trusted.

In practice, however, issuers are not always trustworthy, and in some cases, the banking infrastructure is too weak, or too hostile, for such services to exist. Financial derivatives provide an alternative. Here, instead of a single issuer providing the funds to back up an asset, a decentralized market of speculators, betting that the price of a cryptographic reference asset (eg. ETH) will go up, plays that role.

Unlike issuers, speculators have no option to default on their side of the bargain because the hedging contract holds their funds in escrow. Note that this approach is not fully decentralized, because a trusted source is still needed to provide the price ticker, although arguably even still this is a massive improvement in terms of reducing infrastructure requirements (unlike being an issuer, issuing a price feed requires no licenses and can likely be categorized as free speech) and reducing the potential for fraud. ​[4]

We've taken this approach, and we have come up with an elegant solution. We will be able to provide a decentralized stable peer-to-peer cash system available to anyone anywhere based on the best blockchain tech available and putting the backup trust in the economic properties of the blockchain class in itself. In other words, you will not need to trust any government monetary policy for the protocol to hold.