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.
Hybrid USD stablecoin FRAX expands to Avalanche
FRAX, the world’s first fractional-algorithmic stablecoin, is bringing its US dollar-pegged stablecoin to Avalanche’s decentralised finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
Upon completion of the deployment (expected to be by 20 March), FRAX will expand the selection of stablecoins available on the platform and offer unique functionality as a decentralised, permissionless stablecoin.
FRAX employs a hybrid, fractional-algorithmic model that combines the best qualities of 100 per cent fiat-backed stablecoins and pure algorithmic stablecoins. It seeks to be the first stablecoin protocol to create scalable, trustless, stable, and ideologically pure on-chain money.
The team behind FRAX will expand to Avalanche by moving FRAX over the Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge (AEB) but will actively explore plans to port its reserve and minting contracts to Avalanche in the future should the demand be sufficient.
“The vision for FRAX is to be the first and biggest multi-chain algorithmic stablecoin. Getting FRAX stablecoins on Avalanche is our first major step in realising the multichain vision,” says Sam Kazemian, one of the core team members.
Many stablecoin protocols have entirely embraced one spectrum of design (entirely collateralised) or the other extreme (entirely algorithmic with no backing). Collateralised stablecoins either have custodial risk or require on-chain over-collateralisation. These designs provide a stablecoin with a fairly tight peg with higher confidence than purely algorithmic designs.
Purely algorithmic designs provide a trustless, scalable model that captures the vision of decentralised money, but have some drawbacks. Notably, they are difficult to bootstrap, slow to grow (as of Q4 2020 none have significant traction), and can exhibit extreme periods of volatility, which erodes confidence in their usefulness as actual stablecoins.
The FRAX Protocol is a two token system encompassing a stablecoin FRAX (FRAX) and a governance token FRAX Shares (FXS). FRAX can always be minted and redeemed from the treasury contract for 1 dollar in value. Arbitrageurs and users are able to use this mechanism to keep the FRAX price close to 1 dollar. Technical details behind the price stability mechanism can be found here. Impressively, FRAX has kept the peg tight to $1 with less than 2 per cent deviation since launch without exception.
Since the launch of the AEB on 8 February, smart contract activity on Avalanche has boomed, with transactions increasing by 848 per cent to over 515,000, and unique wallets increasing by 1,530 per cent to top 35,000.
In the five months since launching mainnet on 21 September, Avalanche has gained over 830 full, block-producing validators participating in-network consensus, and an additional 5,500 delegators participating in staking. Collectively, they make Avalanche the most decentralised layer 1 blockchain platform, and the third-largest in staked value at over USD8 billion.