Stablecoins

A crypto token engineered to be worth exactly one dollar sounds boring — until you notice it’s the plumbing under nearly all of crypto, with most trading, lending and payments running on it and roughly $320 billion in circulation. Four very different machines try to keep that promise, and one of them blew up $40 billion. This topic opens every one.

Here’s what you’ll take apart:

• What a peg is — the quiet arbitrage that keeps a coin pinned to $1.
• Fiat-backed coins — USDT and USDC, where the whole question is what’s really in the reserve.
• Crypto-backed dollars — DAI, minted as over-collateralized loans against locked crypto and policed by liquidations.
• Algorithmic coins — holding the peg with code and faith alone, and the death spiral that vaporized Terra’s UST and $40 billion with it.
• Depegs — why USDC briefly fell to $0.88 the weekend Silicon Valley Bank failed, plus a risk map you can actually use.
• The rulebooks — the GENIUS Act and MiCA now drawing the lines.

Sitting on the intermediate rung of the ladder, this is where “it’s just a digital dollar” stops being a hand-wave and becomes a machine you can take apart.