恍如大富翁地皮 囤積虛幣收租和味 ｜ 蘋果日報
在低息環境下，港元或美元的銀行存款利息接近零，扣除通脹，現金為王的策略必輸。在加密貨幣的世界，情況卻大有不同，存款是有利息的，部份甚至可達雙位數。例如穩定幣（stable coin）存款，儘管價格沒有上落、沒有孖展炒賣的空間，利息也高達10多厘。使用加密貨幣收租，是一門利潤可觀的生意。
持量是未來挖礦機
比特幣使用算力證明的方法已過時，新的區塊鏈都採用持量證明。持量（staking）其實就是未來的挖礦機，先擁有加密貨幣，才可以參與驗證交易從而賺取認證費用，俗稱掘礦。以往要掘比特幣，只需持有礦機，可以完全不持有比特幣，本質上不鼓勵礦工長線持有。持量證明後，創造了一個良性循環，掘礦者傾向繼續持有加密貨幣，進而減少供應推升價格。這有點像香港的士牌，要經營生意必須買入牌照，而且限量供應，如果平台使用量提高，牌照價格自然飆升。
去中心化交易所（DeX）是另一個用持量收租的例子，只要把加密貨幣鎖定於流動性池（liquidity pool），就等於參與現實世界的造市商（market making），可以穩定地收取某個比例交易費用，在市旺時收入很可觀。另外，加密貨幣的持份者有投票權，可對某個特定議題做決策，例如是否增加總供應量，好比現實世界的股東特別大會。以上種種需求，創造出加密貨幣的借貸服務，有人會願意付出利息租用別人的加密貨幣，也有人囤積加密貨幣收租。整個發展方向，像虛擬版的大富翁遊戲，誰持有地皮誰就有權收租。當然，收回來的租金同樣也是加密貨幣，傳統投資者例如是巴菲特，可能認為這不是真正現金流。因此，如果相信加密貨幣就是未來的貨幣，現在就應及早買入地皮收租。
Coinbase, Naval, Framework Ventures Back $19M Raise for a Capital-Efficient Stablecoin
Fei Labs, a project building a more capital-efficient decentralized stablecoin, raised $19 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Framework Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, among others.
The raise, disclosed Monday, is another sign competition is heating up among issuers of stablecoins. These cryptocurrencies are designed to hold their value against some mainstream asset, usually (as in Fei’s case) the U.S. dollar.
Stablecoins play a linchpin role in the crypto ecosystem, allowing traders to quickly move fiat currency (or the next best thing) between global exchanges to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities that might disappear if they waited for a bank wire to clear. In the mushrooming decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, stablecoins are a common form of collateral for loans and other contracts.
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“First, we want to be the best stablecoin in DeFi, in which we would consider DAI to be the primary competitor,” said Joey Santoro, CEO of Feil Labs, which is building the Fei protocol, and author of the white paper describing it. After that, it would challenge other stablecoins, the largest of which is Tether’s USDT, with a $37.5 billion market capitalization as of Friday.
ParaFi Capital and Variant Fund also participated in the round.
Fei’s “genesis launch” is set for March 22, when users will be able to post ETH to get FEI tokens. Early participants in the sale and in the protocol’s liquidity pools on DeFi exchange Uniswap will be incentivized with TRIBE, the project’s governance token.
Other leading stablecoins have drawbacks. MakerDAO’s DAI is over-collateralized, and requires thousands of users to manage individual vaults of their collateral. USDC and USDT are centralized and censorable. Purely algorithmic stablecoins, such as basis cash, are very strange.
Like those assets, “FEI is basically a reserve-backed stablecoin,” Santoro said. But unlike its predecessors, FEI, on the cusp of its market debut, would work through a direct incentive method.
How it works
From the white paper:
“This paper proposes a new stability mechanism called direct incentives. A direct incentive stablecoin is one in which both the trading activity and usage of the stablecoin are incentivized, where rewards and penalties drive the price towards the peg.”
In other words, FEI can give users bonuses or charge fees for making trades that help it maintain its peg to the dollar. The developers have tweaked the behavior of an ERC-20 token, which runs on the Ethereum network, so that certain transactions (to start, transactions with the liquidity pool on Uniswap) can face a tax or earn a boost, depending on whether FEI needs to shrink or grow supply.
FEI works on a straightforward transactional basis. “Users can buy FEI from the protocol, and the protocol takes those assets in reserve, which we call protocol controlled value,” Santoro explained. In other words, users don’t stake ETH, Ethereum’s native currency; they buy FEI. The asset traded belongs to the Fei protocol after the trade.
“That’s sort of where the magic of FEI is. The assets in reserve could be under-collateralized, they can be over-collateralized,” Santoro explained. Further, the assets would be deployed elsewhere, such as on the secondary market or – later – in yield-generating projects.
“If you want to get more FEI, you just buy it for a dollar [worth of something] from the protocol,” he said. There’s no debt that has to be maintained by users, as there is on MakerDAO, which generates the stablecoin DAI. The protocol would simply mint FEI as needed.
There will only ever be as much FEI as the market wants, because it will all just be bought on the market.
Exit ramp
What about when users want to sell? “You can’t directly redeem ETH from the protocol. You have to go to a secondary market,” Santoro said, but the Fei protocol will be placing the ETH it takes there anyway.
If and when the protocol allows other assets to be used for buying FEI, the decision to add those assets will be up to holders of TRIBE, the project’s governance token. “It doesn’t have to be just ETH,” Santoro said, but the developers will encourage the community to only add other decentralized assets, such as DAI or aDAI. Governance will also decide where to allocate the protocol’s assets.
“Fei Protocol is intentionally governance minimized,” Santoro said.
“We are basically trying to say, ‘What’s good about Tether and what’s good about MakerDAO?’ and take the good things,” he said. The mistakes the team wants to avoid repeating include “Tether being opaque and MakerDAO being governance-heavy and over-collateralized.”
Variant Fund’s Jesse Walden said its modest governance scope and less-weighty collateralization make FEI “more socially and financially scalable.”
If ETH plunges…
When the ETH price falls and traders want to get out of FEI, selling it on the Uniswap pool will incur some kind of burn. In other words, you won’t get quite $1.00 out of your sale of one unit of FEI on Uniswap because part of it will evaporate when you initiate the trade.
Next, the protocol can itself buy back FEI with its assets and burn the FEI. In both cases, taking supply off the market should push the price back up.
But, should neither of those strategies work, TRIBE can inflate and then buy FEI off the market as well (which is a role MKR serves in MakerDAO). This feature won’t be live at launch, but Santoro expects it will be implemented.
If FEI rises over its target on other markets, users can always go to the FEI protocol to buy more FEI at the $1 peg to take advantage of the arbitrage in the short term, boosting supply and bringing the price back in line with the peg in short order.
That said, FEI also will have certain incentivized pools, such as the ETH/FEI pool on Uniswap. When it wants to expand supply, the protocol can also mint slightly extra FEI when users trade ETH for FEI. This is a part of the direct incentivization mechanic.
行政院前院長陳冲：面對主權貨幣CBDC 央行應正面接招
行政院前院長陳冲（本報系資料庫） facebook
行政院前院長、新世代金融基金會董事長陳冲今（5）日指出，面對世界研究中央銀行數位貨幣（CBDC）的風潮，我國中央銀行到了得正面接招的時候了。
陳冲指出，根據近日報導中的「央行指出」字眼了解，央行傾向由公私合作提供CBDC，央行更認為國際主要央行探索CBDC，不限於目前發展對支付系統與貨幣制度的威脅，還有爭奪金融霸權意味。換言之，我國既無意金融霸權，即無須發展CBDC，縱有必要，也可公私合作。
推薦
陳冲認為，如果這是央行本意，身為國人也無話可說，但須指出CBDC是Legal tender，代表國家主權，在我國是否適合公私合作？ 央行自身對CBDC如有深入研究，是否更易於判斷合作對手的適當性？而且CBDC只是支付工具的一種，與其他支付業者的服務仍有區別，CBDC與一般紙幣、輔幣都可轉入電子錢包，是否有電子支付業者就可不要CBDC？
陳冲指出，今年2月27日至3月1日，經濟日報連三天刊出「迎接貨幣新紀元」的專題報導，距離他2006年2月提出的文章「貨幣由metal based到paper based，將來也會變成software based，恐須未雨綢繆」，恰恰好15周年，15年來歷經Smart phone誕生、App充斥、Blockchain轉型各個階段，他曾多次呼籲研議CBDC，今日自然樂見數位貨幣的浪潮狂湧未艾。
陳冲表示，15年來，CBDC已由「不值一哂」，到「各方矚目」，恐怕是央行必須正面接招的時候了。就連美國聯準會主席鮑爾也表示，「我不希望有一天醒來，發現美元已經不是世界儲備貨幣，其原因是我們剛剛錯過了一場技術變革」。台灣也許無意問鼎金融霸權，但鮑爾這一席話，還是可以參考。
陳冲強調，近日在市場上，許多加密貨幣價格劇烈起伏。加密貨幣不是幣，也許是commodity，也許是投資工具，但不是貨幣，更不是CBDC。至於穩定幣（stable coin），以Diem（前身為Libra）為代表，其與實體貨幣掛鉤，有電子商務為後盾，對現有體系比較構成威脅，德國財政部長（Olaf Scholz）在Libra改名為Diem後仍稱之為「披著羊皮的狼」，足見其威脅。其實在舉世央行矚目下，穩定幣勢必接受監管，野性將受馴服，出不了大亂子，充其量只是「披著狼皮的羊」。至數位主權貨幣（CBDC），一旦成功問世，在各國央行審慎規劃下，應該只是國民「錢包」中以「數位形態」出現的現鈔，是電子錢包中支付工具的一項，會大量減少輔幣（零錢）、現鈔的使用，如此而已。
陳冲認為，以數位方式發行主權貨幣，當然不是簡單的事，其中有技術面的考慮，還有政策面、金融面的考量。CBDC如果發行，應不會全面發行，一方面各國央行總會避免劇烈衝擊金融體系，一方面要讓金融機構放心，最重要的是央行也不願失去中介機構的緩衝。陳沖建議先從最底層的小額交易進行試驗，就是此一意旨。