Unchained - Why It's so Hard to Keep Stablecoins Stable

Episode Date: February 27, 2018

Rune Christensen of MakerDAO and Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life and High Fidelity, discuss why stablecoins are called crypto's holy grail, why they may be what's necessary for mainstream adoption, and all the ways a stablecoin can be constructed. Philip brings in his experience with Second Life's Linden dollars, often called the first true virtual currency, to describe how it was constructed and how he's planning to disseminate the cryptocurrency of his new virtual world, High Fidelity. Plus, we talk about why a digital USD wouldn't be a threat to stablecoins and whether collateralized stablecoins resemble fractional reserve banking or not. Maker DAO: https://makerdao.com/ High Fidelity: https://highfidelity.com/ HFC: https://docs.highfidelity.com/high-fidelity-commerce/basics/hfc More info on Linden dollars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Second_Life The Hacker Noon post by Haseeb Qureshi: https://hackernoon.com/stablecoins-designing-a-price-stable-cryptocurrency-6bf24e2689e5 IMF SDRs: http://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/14/51/Special-Drawing-Right-SDR Episode with Bill Tai: http://unchainedpodcast.co/maitai-globals-bill-tai-on-why-blockchain-is-the-6th-wave-of-technology Vitalik's post on collateralized debt obligations for issuer-backed tokens: https://ethresear.ch/t/collateralized-debt-obligations-for-issuer-backed-tokens/525 Other stablecoins: Tether: https://tether.to/ Basecoin: http://www.getbasecoin.com/ Havven: https://havven.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, the podcast where we hear from innovators, pioneers, and thought leaders in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. I'm your host, Laura Shin, an independent journalist covering all things crypto. If you love Unchained, be sure to let the world know with a review on Apple Podcasts. Those reviews help new listeners find out about the show. Also, spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Telegram, and wherever you discuss crypto. And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Laura Shin. This episode is brought to you by Start Engine, an ICO platform focused on issuing securities, tokens, in compliance with SEC rules. StartEngine can help your business launch a regulated ICO. Go to startengine.com slash Unchained for a 20% discount. Start Engine does not provide legal advice. Today's topic is stable coins. Here with me to discuss what has been called the Holy Grail of Crypto are Rune Christensen, founder of MakerDAO, and Philip Rosdale, the founder of Second Life and the co-founder of High Fidelity. Welcome, Roon, and Philip? Thank you. Thanks for having me. So before we dive into today's topic, I want to have each of you explain your background. Rune, let's start with you. You are the founder of one of the more

well-known staple coin projects, MakerDAO. How did you get into crypto and come to head up this project? In 2011, I first discovered Bitcoin when I saw a Bitcoin address and sort of followed that trail, which led me down the whole crypto rabbit hole. then I bought into Bitcoin heavily and really got excited about crypto in general, but during the great crypto crash of 2014, I lost a lot of money from the, basically, from the volatility, and that's what led me on the path towards stable coins, as I sort of felt personally how important that's going to be for mainstream adoption and use of cryptocurrency. So eventually, me and a number of people from various stablecoin communities,

from the beginning of the stablecoin project as a whole, we ended up going to Ethereum and basically setting up, we tried to basically make the ultimate stablecoin in Ethereum because we saw this smart contract ecosystem really as the perfect place to bootstrap and grow and grow on stablecoin. So that's been, we've been working with that for the past three years. And then finally this December 17th, we were able to launch the first consumer-ready stablecoin, which is now live and being used on a number of exchanges and buy businesses.

And one detail that I love about your story is that you were an English teacher in Asia, I believe, right, when you got into crypto? Yes, that's right. I was an English teacher in China and then started an HR agency that brought in other English teachers to China. And it's basically from doing that business, it was in that context, I somehow stumbled upon Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And also I sold my business and invested all the profits into Bitcoin, earning a lot

money, but then subsequently losing most of it again because of the great bubbles and crashes of the early days. And so it was just that experience of losing the money that made you think that a stable coin was needed, or how did you come up with the idea for a stable coin? It was partly that, and then also just sort of the inherent promise of a stable coin. So stable coins were actually invented in the BitShares community. The very first design was just like a simple, system where you take some like some some cryptocurrency called bit shares and you back a stable coin that's pegged one dollar with this other cryptocurrency so you sort of have a you know like the collateral behind the currency and then what we've made now with die is basically an evolution on that

concept where we've made it more powerful and we've solved all of its deficiencies And so, Philip, you actually work in another area, VR, virtual reality, and founded Second Life. And then you left that and have now founded a new VR company. And what I thought about your experience that would be relevant on Unchained was what happened with Linden Dollars. So tell us about your background, but also tell us what Linden Dollars, which what some people have called is what some people have called the first real virtual currency. Tell us what those were. Thanks. Yeah.

Well, my life has been about VR and virtual worlds. And from the time I was a kid, I wanted to build kind of open-ended worlds that people could come into from all over the world as avatars and do whatever they wanted to. And a big part of that and a big part of second life was establishing a currency because right from the beginning, people were building things like clothes for their avatars or, you know, furniture or things like that. And we wanted there to be a way for them to buy and sell them from each other. And so out of need, we built a digital currency called the Linden Dollar. It was introduced in about 2003. And it grew to today a virtual economy whose value, whose gross domestic product total transactions,

is about $6 to $700 million a year. And a few years ago, it was even closer to about a billion dollars a year. So a lot of people, about a million people or so a month, exchanging goods and services with each other in a virtual world where they were typically in different countries as users and they needed a way to pay each other and they needed a way to pay each other quickly in small amounts. And so we built the Linden Dollar and we built a monetary policy and we recognized and succeeded in making it stable, which was a very important part of allowing people to have real job. jobs in second life. And so, yeah, a lot of sort of similar stuff to what we're seeing now with crypto. Yeah. And as we'll get into later in the episode, you are doing more experiments with that. But before we get to that, let's first define this term, staple coin. What is a stable coin?

How do you guys define it? I would say the very basic meaning of the word is just cryptocurrency or a coin, right? that has stable price. So typically people, they think of it as being picked, right? And so it's like a price that's like, like, one dollar or one euro or something like that. But I think another definition that is also valid is just one where it's like, over time on average, it's stable against sort of the price of goods. Yeah, I would agree.

I think the goal, and certainly this was the goal with Second Life, if people are going to engage in trade, not speculation, but actually buying and selling goods and services from each other, they need to have some kind of a monetary unit, which when compared to something like their rent or what they think their work is worth, changes slowly over time. So like what Rune said,

something that changes slowly over time and isn't wildly driven by, you know, things like speculation. And so why do you think people call them the holy grail of crypto? Is it because it's difficult or because that will be the lynch to the crypto world taking off? Or why is this considered such an important challenge? I mean, I really think it's like it.

Right now, crypto is, it's very much about hype and speculation, right? And there's a lot of potential and a lot of promise. But it's actually limited how much we're seeing in terms of real-life implementation and real-life solutions being delivered right now. And I really think one of the main things that's holding everything back is this pervasive issue of volatility, right? You're just not going to be able to make some sort of fantastic insurance application or, you know, a derivative or something. If you have to design the whole thing around an asset that can change 20% over 24 hours. Instead, once we have a stable coin and there is this stability that can be used in trade for goods of services,

you know, like Philip is talking about, right, like that is something that you can rely on for the everyday things that you're relating to in terms of what you spend your money on. That's when you finally open up the types of products that can actually change everyday lives because they'll no longer be this barrier to adoption in a form of volatility. I think another piece to add to that is simply that, and we really saw this with Second Life, and we're seeing it with Bitcoin and Ethereum. If people believe that the future utility of a cryptocurrency of a currency is greater than it is today, then they're going to, and that currency is limited in numbers,

they're going to speculate correctly that it's going to increase in value, and that's exactly what we're seeing with Bitcoin and Ethereum. But the real world has shown us numerous times that if something is being speculated on, and in particular if it's speculated to increase in value, it will not be used for day-to-day transatlient. No one would buy a car or a refrigerator with Bitcoin today, given that they know they might be giving up a doubling in the value of that money over even, you know, the next month or so. And so we're not seeing regular transactions happening between people for goods and services, which was the original promise of Bitcoin. And so we've got to fix that somehow.

Yeah. Well, that's interesting and sort of funny because there have been a few people that have bought. things like Lamborghinis with their bitcoins. But as Chris Berniske pointed out on Twitter, he was like, why would you do that? Because then you're trading it for an asset that will only depreciate. I think the most famous one wasn't it? Of course, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it was that $140 million pizza, right? The Bitcoin pizza from some years ago. Right, right. 10,000 Bitcoins were spent on two pizzas. Yeah, one other thing I just wanted to throw out there when Arun was talking about,

how this could be important for things like insurance. Another application that people often say stable coins are necessary for is prediction markets, which, you know, that's something that everyone thinks like, oh, this is kind of like an idea that has a lot of promise with cryptocurrency, but, you know, still, it probably isn't going to really go anywhere if you don't have a stable coin. So there was this recent Hacker Noon post by Haseem Koreshi, who's a, I guess an engineer at Earned.com. And he talked about stablecoins in it and laid out the three main strategies for creating a stable coin. I don't know if you guys recall the post, but can you just sort of describe for me what are the most typical strategies?

Yeah, so I mean, so I agree with his post in general that there are three main strategies in terms of stable coins, right? And then the most simple one is, I guess that's what Linton Dollars were, for instance, and also what something like Tether is and a number of other currencies, where it's basically you just have a backing of some sort, and then you have a one-to-one representation of that collateral. So for instance, if you have like a stable coin that's worth $1, and there are a million of those stable coins outstanding, then it means there should be a million dollars in a bank account somewhere.

And that's, for instance, what Tether is claiming that their stable coin does, right? So basically, what you're really doing is you're making this sort of like an IOU actually, right, that can be tracked and easily transacted between people. And the advantage of that model is that it's very straightforward, right? It's pretty easy to understand what's going on. The disadvantage is that it's also fully centralized. So some would argue that it limits the potential of, for instance, it's used in blockchain technology because it's sort of like if you use that on a prediction market for instance then the

prediction market as a whole to some degree also becomes centralized so that's the first and and most basic of them yeah if i could add actually what we did with second life was not that we did not use a dollar peg with second life what we actually did with second life was we created new currency and sold it on the open currency market we several other people people, much like what we see with crypto today, there are a number of open markets where you can exchange London dollars for things like the euro or other currencies. There's also a foreign exchange site called the Lindex, which Linden Lab has of their own, which allows you to exchange linden dollars for dollars and for euros. The strategy we actually used was different and

quite interesting. It was that as the exchange rate increased gradually as more people, as the economy grew. We actually printed more money. We did this transparently. We told everybody exactly what we were doing. Everyone could see the trades we were making. And we sold that new currency on the same open market. And we did that with a goal of holding the exchange rate roughly constant as the economy grew. And that was very successful. The exchange rate of the linen dollar to the dollar is about 265 to one. And it's changed by no more than a couple of percent a month over like the last decade. So it's been a remarkably effective strategy, and it didn't use a reserve peg like Tether does. Okay, that's actually really interesting.

But isn't there, so there's no reserves behind it at all? What about like the redemption, like if people start moving out of Linden Dollars? So one of the really interesting things is that the Linden Dollar went through a growth from a zero-zero economy to a billion-dollar-year economy over the first five years or so. and it has stayed roughly flat to slightly shrinking over the next five years or so. Interestingly enough, we never offered to redeem. We never offered any promise to purchase currency back from people at any time during that entire phase, those two phases, growth and then stability is slightly shrinking.

And interestingly enough, and I can't give an answer for this other than just the facts, the linen dollar has not weakened against the dollar, even though the economy has reduced in size by perhaps maybe 15% or so over the last few years. So, Linden Lab doesn't sell, they sell little or no currency on the open market anymore, so the money supply stays constant. But the exchange rate has actually stayed remarkably constant during that period as well. And any theories as to why? I think there's a psychological belief that because we had stated and demonstrated a willingness to increase the money supply as a result of increasing exchange rate, it created a kind of a consensual belief and a treatment of the currency as just being relatively stable. So I think it indicates that there are psychological forces, as we all know, as kind of, you know, or at least armchair economists in my case. It creates, there are psychological forces that can be brought to bear that are surprisingly effective.

And I think the simple fact that the money supply could change as it cannot with Bitcoin created a broad public belief that it was a stable thing. And so it kind of made the Linden dollar more stable than one would have thought even without, as Rune said, the ability to buy back the currency. I also think that just because there is this inherent economy, right, underneath, I mean, that's definitely going to have a big impact on the, right? So the long term, like stuff like money velocity and those kind of things, right, meaning that there's just going to be this demand for the currency that sort of keeps it being useful over time. I think that's – I couldn't agree more, yeah. With Amex platinum, almost every purchase made with your card can be covered with points, including new tastes, new fits, and virtually everything in between. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply.

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at participating Canadian restaurants for a limited time. Franks Red Hot is a registered trademark of the French's food company LLC. Yeah, and for those of you who want to hear more about velocity, that's sort of like how quickly money changes hands in an economy over some period of time. Chris Berniske went into this in depth in the podcast I did with him in the fall, And that was a really, really fascinating episode. I really urge you to listen to it. So let's actually continue with the other strategies for creating stable coins. So we have the one strategy that you discussed where it's sort of like tether where you're keeping dollars in reserve. And so it should be

fully collateralized. But I think the downside, as Rune pointed out for that, is that it's more centralized, which, as you know, in cryptocurrency is definitely considered a big risk. So what are the other strategies. So I'd say the next strategy, and if you think about this, this recent post describing the three strategies, then this was described in the top right of the triangle and was called crypto-collateralized stable coins. And I think this is where you would say die and maker falls under. However, I guess one thing that's important to point out is that crypto can take many forms, right? And really, the way we call, like, what we consider this type of stable coin to be, and the category we would put dye and make it down under, it's just multi-collateralized

stable coins. So basically, a stable coin that instead of just having like a one-to-one deposit in a bank account, instead it has collateral that is in many different forms and shapes kind of and diversified across all these different types. it can be in basically. And then most importantly, it's always over collateralized. So for instance, if you look at one die and how and what it's backed by currently, instead of it being a one to one dollar in a bank account, for instance, it's something like three to one value of Ethereum held in a smart contract. So instead of you can go into a bank and then be able to retrieve one dollar for your stable coin,

you can go to the smart contract system and you can retrieve, well, you can retrieve one dollar worth of ETH, but you know that even if the price of ETH falls, for instance, there's still going to be excess ETH available for you to retrieve. And then what's even more crucial is that over time, this infrastructure is expanded to support any type of asset here. So it's not just going to be Ethereum that will be used as collateral. It's also gold through various gold tokenization, price. projects. It's also like traditional assets like stocks and bonds and basically anything that sort of adds to the overall stability and diversification of like the total collateral pool, which then gives you this hybrid functionality where on one hand, the system itself is

decentralized in the same way that something like Bitcoin or Ether is, right? It's just like a some code that everybody agrees on that runs the system, and that's how the fundamental monetary policy of the stable coin is governed. But then on the other hand, you do have access to these real-world assets and all these various assets that are used as collateral that are sort of held in virtual bank accounts, so to speak, right? Like all these various places where it's like something like, you know, gold in Singapore or Ethereum on the Ethereum blockchain

or US dollars in the US bank. account, all of this is put together into one system and all contributing to the stability of the stable coin. And the crucial difference between this and something like Tether is that even if one of the points, like one of the places where collateral is deposited fails, basically turns out to be insolvent or something, there are still so many other points in the system that on their own offer this over-collateralized protection, that a single failure in a system doesn't really affect the stability of the overall system,

and it can mitigate even relatively large crashes or unexpected events and still remain stable for the end user who can just trust it to be $1 or whatever it's supposed to be stable against. And wait, and I just, there's one thing part I don't understand. So I obviously get how, you. you can use ether to overcollateralize or a crypto version of gold. But then what about something like US dollars? Like where would you store that?

Well, I mean, actually, if we like, if Tether was extremely legit and it was like totally transparent how, you know, their claim to the underlying dollars worked, then it would just be through something like Tether, right? However, like there is another project called TrueUSD, which is making something similar. basically they're calling it they're pretty much positioning themselves as tether but legit pretty much

and that's an example of something we could use as a really great collateral because it would be something that it would be transparent for us to sort of understand the risks of it and it will allow us to add it into the autonomous smart contract system and then just have it be another node in the overall diversified portfolio

and when you say tetherbubes legit. They're working with kind of like known custodians around the world and that, you know, there's everything is done in compliance with like, know your customer and anti-money and anti-money laundering regulation. So there's kind of like a certain level of comfort that people would have in those dollars actually being in reserve. Did I characterize that correctly? Yeah, exactly. And crucially, it's also possible to take true use. and go to them with your true USD and then they will give you real dollars in return, which is something that Tether used to say they offered people,

but at some point they just stopped actually letting anyone do that. Okay, and one other thing that I wanted to add to what you're describing here is that, am I wrong in thinking that this is somewhat similar to this concept that the IMF has, which I actually wish I had thought of this earlier when I was writing the questions, but I googled it quickly. I guess it's called an SDR special drawing, right? And it's sort of like, I think it's a basket of different currencies or something. Do you know about that?

And is that similar to what you're trying to do with MakerDAO? Yeah, so what's really interesting is actually that dye used to be pegged to the SDR. So we used to actually be really obsessed with the IMF and the SDR and what they were doing with this currency basket. Basically because, I mean, there are some parallels there, right? because it's about how they diversify these various currencies to create a basket that's supposed to be superior compared to any single currency. However, after doing a lot of research on sort of the actual performance of the SDR in the market, we actually came to the conclusion that there isn't much advantage over just using the US dollar as our reference of stability.

right? So that's why Dye is now just pegged $1. Because ultimately it's just easier for regular people to understand. And you don't really gain much advantage in using the STR, which actually is a little strange. I mean, because it is possible to design currency baskets that are superior. But the STR just isn't designed in that way. And I guess the principle of how the underlying backing and like the fact that you have a basket behind it, isn't exactly the same as the way like die works with the collateral and so on, right, because the SDR is just sort of a one-to-one backing and one-to-one pick, so to speak, of the exposure.

Whereas in our system, it's kind of that we have this, you know, we have this highly diversified collateral that all has, like, all these different exposures, right? And there can be thousands of different collateral types in the system. and then ultimately we use all of that to back something that's pegged to exactly one dollar regardless of what's happening to the collateral behind it. And the way we're able to enforce that is because we just always ensure there's over-collateralization. So basically it's because there is always going to be, you know, if there's a million dollars of die outstanding, there's going to be something like $2 million worth of collateral at least

or just like a large amount of collateral. So even if the collateral changes from day to day, it doesn't impact the fact that there's still more than $1 worth of collateral for the die to sort of claim. And that just ensures that die remains overall stable regardless of what's going on in the market. And if I could add, you know, aren't we really talking about as we look at these reserve strategies, these backing strategies for different stable, coins and cryptocurrencies, we're really talking about a broader phenomenon, which has been an important part of the financial history of the whole world, which is fractional reserve banking. You know, a bank's ability to make loans is based on the fraction less than 100% of reserves that it has to maintain. I'm struck by the observation that a lot of the stable coin design

exercise is one that is very similar to the question of, you know, what fraction of deposits a bank is required to hold on account and that that's been obviously such an important and interesting issue in world history. And it seems like we're going through it again with cryptocurrencies. I would also add that there were, coming from second life, it seems to me that there are two important different types of stability. There's seeking stability during a period of monotonic or increasing growth, and then they're seeking stability during a period of equilibrium, where there are, for example, as many people using cryptocurrency as want to, and then there are all these real-world currencies. It strikes me from the second

life background that it's very important that you understand which stage you're in. I think we're in a stage with cryptocurrency, and I bet most would agree right now where everything is growing, because for the most part, cryptocurrency is as yet underutilized. And so like Second Life in its first few years, you're going to see steady growth as people are trying to make some use of these new systems. Philip, I actually want to go back to what you were saying, where you sort of compared these over-collateralized stable coins to fractional reserve banking. Because I feel like it's the opposite, right?

You need to put up more money than you can take out, which is. is a really different thing from getting a loan where you don't put anything in and you get to take something out, right? So, like, I understand what you're saying on a certain level, but I feel like the individual experience is completely different. It's definitely not a credit system. Well, I guess what I'm saying is going back to what you guys said about maybe Tether being overly centralized. If we had a transparent reckoning of dollars and euros and other currencies that were submitted for deposit in, say, a regular bank in exchange for a certain amount of a token on a cryptocurrency.

And that was done all over the world, and we could publicly see a lot of different balances that would tell us essentially how large our reserve stake of U.S. dollars overall was. Then I think we will end up with a financial system with a fractional reserve. We don't need – I don't see the – I personally, although I'm not an expert on this, don't see the reason why we would need to collateralize beyond 100%. We should be able to collateralize less than 100%, just like we do with the regular banking system, I think. So I just want to add some here about what fractional reserve actually means.

Because it means, so it's an interesting point. This overcollateralization, isn't that the opposite of fractional reserve, for instance? So what fractional reserve actually means is how much of the reserve, how much of the bank's collateral is held with the central bank and how much is held with like, you know, in the various loan agreements that the bank is doing. So, I mean, what's interesting is, and it does, you know, make perfect sense when you think about it, is that from the point of view of a bank, even when they're doing fractional reserve lending, they're still over-collateralizing in the sense that they are always making sure that they have enough,

like they have some sort of claim that they feel is enough to cover what they're risking, right? Because then they'd never make a loan to someone who they feel could not possibly pay back that loan. But what's interesting is that this claim, like this collateral can take all sorts of strange forms. Right, they did that. I mean, on average, right, like if they're rational. But so what's interesting is that this collateral can take all sorts of strange forms. It could be like a personal liability, right, like a claim on someone's salary, basically. Or could be like lien on a house, which is a really typical type of collateral to use, right?

And then when you're talking about fractional reserve, you're actually like, it's really like the fraction of the reserve that's like hard reserves and the fraction that are sort of more soft collateral. And then in the context of a stable, of an overcollateralized stable coin like dye, it's, it's a, actually the exact same situation you're in because you have to also think about this like how much of the collateral needs to be like really hard extremely tangible assets and how much of it can we risk basically having us more you know slightly more unreliable more soft assets that on one hand are like they're less it's it's more hard to like predict what happens to them in the event of a crash for instance but then at the same time there's way more of this stuff available and we can heavily over collateralize with this kind of stuff.

So it's actually a dynamic that's very similar. And when you govern a stable coin like die, it's definitely extremely important to rely on sort of the existing knowledge from the financial system, right? And use existing models, existing theory and especially avoid historical blunders in the banking system and that kind of stuff and basically make sure that we're building on top of the knowledge that already exists. Okay, so we're going to finish this discussion about Maker and we're going to also talk about Lyndon dollars and some other proposals for stable coins. But first, I'd like to take a quick break to tell you about our fabulous sponsor, Start Engine. Interested in raising capital

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In short, StartEngine provides a complete token ecosystem. If your company wants to launch a regulated ICO, just go to startengine.com slash unchained for a free consultation and a 20% discount on future ICO setup services. That's start engine.com slash unchained. StartEngan does not provide legal advice. Potential sponsors, this ad spot could be yours. If you or your company is interested in sponsoring Unchained, please send you, an email to Laura Shin Podcast at gmail.com. That's L-A-U-R-A-S-H-I-N podcast at g-mell. Our topic today is Stable Coins, and I'm speaking with Rune Christensen, founder of Stablecoin Project MakerDAO

and Philip Rosdale, the founder of VR World's Second Life and High Fidelity. So, Roon, let's actually finish talking about Maker. One point that I wanted to make here is, I think you're starting off with the, you know, what you're using for collateral as being, you know, ether and I guess next year adding gold. But I feel like the success of your project really depends on how diversified it can be, right? Because if you end up using a basket of all cryptocurrencies and then the whole crypto market crashes 90% or something, then your stable coin is not going to be so stable either, right? So doesn't it sort of depend on you getting crypto versions of other kinds of assets? Yeah, absolutely. And that is the one thing we're focusing the most on, right?

It's like getting high-quality diversified collateral from all over the world. And I mean, the core team is working on this a lot. Luckily, what we're seeing is there's just this incredible trend right now in the space that basically a lot of projects all over the world are doing, exactly what we sort of predicted and bet on, which is just making their own platforms for scalable tokenization of securities and various assets. We also have a really, like in the short term, we have some really interesting, like individual projects such as, I mean, there's gold tokens that are actually popping up all over the world. And then we're also seeing a type of real estate

token that just has a really sort of simple and straightforward legal, framework that allows us to actually use tokens that have the same sort of risk profile as real estate, but at the same time, I'm extremely easy to use in our system without having to worry so much about the legal and regulatory framework. However, it is definitely the next step is to actually set up these strong and highly reliable regulatory frameworks that will allow us to use securities as collateral. Like I was talking about, before, right? It's like about like getting like stocks and bonds and commodities and all of this stuff in a format where we know it's going to be strong claims on the underlying assets so that we can

actually rely on them as a significant portion of the collateral for the stable coin. And yeah, I mean, basically this is the biggest, it's the biggest challenge to get this done right. And I think right now it's looking really positive. In the short term, I think we will have more than enough to handle sort of the short-term spike in demand that we expect to come when we launch the fully scalable multilateral system this summer, but also like a clear pipeline towards our end goal, which is this state where the system really is exposed to assets from all over the world. And basically every single legitimate jurisdiction has a very straightforward way to interact with with our system and allow us to use assets from that particular jurisdiction to back die.

So a couple other questions I want to ask you are, we know that different central banks are looking into creating Fiat versions of cryptocurrency. Would something like a Fiat, US dollar, sorry, a crypto version of U.S. dollar, would that threaten MakerDAO? Like, would that just obviate the need for stable coins at all and render your project sort of, not useless, but, you know, obsolete? I mean, so actually, we are really excited about those because we see them basically as like a highly,

like a supercharged tether, basically, right? Like a highly, highly reliable version of the one-to-one back stable coin. And, I mean, first of all, they're really, really reliable collateral in our system, right? And it actually ties a little bit back to the discussion on the fractional reserve, right? because if we can get access to true central bank money as collateral, then we finally actually have an asset that is, you know, that is considered like true reserves in the traditional financial sense.

But if it is a crypto version of USD, then won't that mean that your project is unnecessary? Well, I mean, it's still, you know, like ultimately it's still a claim on a centralized entity, right? I mean, the thing that our system does sort of does differently is, you know, that the system itself is fully autonomous, it's fully decentralized. It really has all the features of, you know, blockchain technology that you want something to have when you sort of, you know, when you're thinking about decentralized applications and that kind of stuff, right? I mean, ultimately, if you build, let's say, a decentralized prediction market, but you're making people use, you know, federal reserve U.S. dollar token. then ultimately it's not really much different from just having the Federal Reserve running that prediction market, basically, right?

Because ultimately they have the ability to pull the plug on it at any time. And who knows, I mean, maybe prediction markets become illegal suddenly, or there's just some sort of action like that could potentially make this a very big weakness in the system. I mean, at the same time, it's not like these type of assets are not extremely useful because they definitely, are. But it's just like, you know, there's always going to be these different use cases for different assets, depending on what their characteristics are. And I think what we might end up seeing is something where Dai is sort of this, you know, like the asset that sort of stands at the center of the entire blockchain, so to speak, like the eye of the storm, kind of. And then something like US dollar, like Federal Reserve tokens, and then, of course, also also.

tokens from every single other central bank, they, you know, they sort of tie into it, right, but they're still centralized. They're still sort of at the edge of the actual decentralized ecosystem. And the one thing they do really well is that they're going to be really excellent on ramps, right? It's going to be a really good way to sort of move money out of the traditional banking system and into the decentralized ecosystem. I like the way you answer that. That is a point that's obviously really important that I hadn't been thinking of. And one last question before we move on to Linden dollars is I wanted to ask, so if Maker is going to be pegged to the U.S. dollar, then that means that it will always be

slightly debased every year, right? Eric Voorhe's in one of the recent episodes talked about this at length. But isn't that essentially the same thing that's going to happen to Maker? So the thing is actually that, like the reason why it die is called, you know, die and not something like decentralized dollar or something like that. It's because I was saying earlier actually, the original gold was not for it to be pegged to the dollar or any particular asset. It was for it to be just sort of stable

in the fundamental sense of the word, right? It would just have like a stable purchasing power over time measured against goods and services. And initially we were actually looking at the SDRs, like the primary reference of stability. and then basically because we did a lot of quantitative measurements, we came to the conclusion that we're better off just picking it to the US dollar initially. But the plan is actually that over time,

if the US dollar sort of fails to be this really well-managed currency, which I would say currently is a really good asset, like in terms of if you look at overall performance of the various currencies around the world, US dollar right now is like a, you know, it's a really solid asset that people can trust. But of course, it's not guaranteed that will always be the case. And basically our plan is to rely on the US dollar for as long as it makes sense. And then the moment that there is something like stronger inflation or hyperinflation or any sort of mismanagement of the US dollar, our system actually supports just deep hacking.

At any point in time, it's basically up to the community to decide when it happens and then implement it through voting. And once they do, they can switch to something like a diversified currency baskets or something like the SDR or even something like a diversified CPI basket. So actually, it could move to something where you just measure value in terms of goods and services and don't even think about exchange rates to other currencies. Wow. This seems like a really powerful concept.

And that's pretty interesting. So before we move on to Linden Dollars, I actually, we didn't finish going through the different strategies for various stable coins, but I just want to mention in addition to True USD, which Rune talked about earlier, another project that a lot of people are talking about is base coin. And that has a pretty different strategy where they essentially use a smart contract as a sort of central bank that inflates or deflates the money supply based on price. and there are other actors in the system. I actually discussed this on a previous podcast. I'm just blanking room. Do you remember the names of the two groups? It's like the bond holders and then the something. Shareholders.

Shareholders and then the bond. Yeah, I mean, so there's this, the original project that's stuff like base coin. And there's another one called Haven as well. Both of them are based on a concept called Senior Shares, which is actually one of the oldest stable coin ideas. But the idea itself, which is called senior shares, actually never was implemented. And then base coin and haven't both sort of complicated the design, basically, but still remained with the fundamental same economic incentives.

And so from the point of view of me, right, like someone who is into Maker and basically understands how Maker makes, you know, works and why die makes sense, because there's some value behind it that's backing it, right, which means that even if suddenly there's a huge drop in demand for die and nobody wants it anymore, you can still count on it having value because you know there are those real assets behind it. And basically, that dynamic was sort of the downfall or the problem of senior shares that faced that meant it never got implemented. The problem is basically that if everybody suddenly at the same time just decides that they no longer want a stable coin and just feel it's risky or there's a run on the bank, basically,

there's just no mechanism to basically deal with that. Like the system relies on a continuous growth over time that always has to be there, always has to be present. Like there always has to be these new people coming in and basically contributing to the stability of the system. And if that continuous flow of newcomers stops, then there's actually nothing left. Like that's sort of the first and last line of defense

is like future demand for the stable coin. And that just means it can be subject to some really horrible, like, crash conditions, basically, right? Like, similar to, like, a run on the bank where if enough people do the run of the bank, the whole bank just collapses to zero. And everybody who weren't fast enough, they just end up with nothing. Yeah, it's definitely one of the more kind of faith-based coins in the sense that it really makes you realize that the only value that an asset has is, or money has is with a value. that people believe it has. But we'll see. There's a lot of really smart people that are backing base coin as well. I believe Andrewson Horowitz and Union Square Ventures invested in it. So let's finally turn back to Lennon dollars. We did describe it a little bit early on,

but I wanted to get into some of the problems that you experienced with it, Philip. I read some critiques also, and I actually don't know if these turned out to have happened. but like I read this critique in 2007 that predicted that linden dollars would eventually run a deficit because the amount of money second life was taking in was less than the amount of linden dollars it was creating um i know also eventually you ended up banning interest bearing banks in second life but you know i don't know how big these problems were in general like what did you feel was your experience with um having a virtual currency and and the problems that could come along with it and the challenges Well, there are so many things to say there. Let me start with interest-bearing banks and our bands on that. Just like fractional reserve banking, there is the legal question of how much reserve to allow. And there were numerous experimenters, you know, inside Second Life that were trying to set up offerings that, you know, feel a little bit like some of the ICO offerings we see today where they looked like, you know, poorly collateralized or, you know, unlikely to fulfill offerings.

in the long term or even somewhat like Ponzi schemes. And so we as the company operating the virtual world had to make both kind of ethical and legal decisions about what we would sort of let people do. And one of those was whether to allow, you know, different types of banking schemes with different types of reserve strategies. And so simplistically, it didn't seem to be adding a lot of value to end users. And so for the most part, we tried not to let people do that. I say try because second life is a big virtual world.

You know, it's huge. It has a million people in it. You can't, you know, for a reasonable amount of money, sort of police everything in such a world. But we did that. As you said, the money supply, looking at this hacker noon article, which, as you say, very well captures this idea of three types of stable coins,

a fiat collateralized stable coin, a crypto collateralized stable coin, and then a non-collateralized stable coin. As you just said, base coin is an example of the non-collarital coin, of the non-collateralized case. Second life, most accurately, could also be described to be a non-collateralized case. For, as I said, we never established a reserve or even offered to buy back currency. We simply built an exchange, an open exchange, where people could trade it out for real currencies. And then the only piece of monetary policy we executed was a willingness to sell additional currency that has increased the money supply as the growth of the economy went up.

and the exchange rate went up. And I think that gets back to a point that I think is true about crypto, and I think is part of why we're all excited about crypto, which is in a growth stage where there's genuine new economic utility, goods and services being created amongst people, you want to have a different strategy for stabilizing an economy than you do under steady state where you just have, say, two gold and silver fighting for share amongst investors. So second life was like an island that

kind of came up out of the sea where we went from no economic value to a billion dollars a year of economic value in the space of three or four years. And I think that's exactly what we're going to see with crypto. Crypto is not going to steal money from existing ideas. It's going to create new economic opportunities. In VR, an example of that would be people being a team. teacher, somebody teaching a bunch of kids that are 10,000 miles away because she can. She can use virtual reality to put a bunch of kids in a room and teach them something. Well, that teacher can charge for her services. And if she's able to do that, she's creating new economic value. And she somehow needs trading currency to be able to do that. And so I think that is the question,

is when you're growing and growing rapidly, how do you increase that money supply in a way that best accommodates the new things that people are doing. So how would you release new money into the system? Well, what we're thinking at high fidelity right now, and I've written and talked about this a bit, is that we've already set up a blockchain that is a fast, low-fee blockchain for people to exchange goods and services inside high fidelity. As we look at, as we look forward and, and anticipate growth as high fidelity starts to get launched and get out there, we're going to see the same kind of economic growth amongst end users that we saw with Second Life. And so we're thinking about what strategy can we use as a cryptocurrency to increase the money supply as that growth

occurs in a way that is best for the economy. And so what we're trying to do, what we're thinking right now, is to try to do something that is fairly similar to what we did successfully with Second Life, but in a decentralized fashion. And a portion of the base coin strategy, which is what you do when the economy is growing, is something that at this point does make a lot of sense to us. And that is you watch the exchange rate as the exchange rate between the new currency and the old currencies, say the fiat currencies, goes up. You algorithmically create new money and you distribute it in some widespread means.

The proposal, for example, from base coin is that you distribute it to a second class of token holders and you allow that class of people to be numerous and trade those tokens amongst themselves. You distribute the currency to them and you let them sell it back eventually on the open market, thus putting it into circulation. Oh, so is that how HFC, the high fidelity currency, is that how that's going to work? We haven't yet implemented that increase in the money supply algorithm, but that is what we are thinking, is to do something very similar to Second Life, where we use an Oracle of some kind to watch a number of exchange rates. And as you said, you know, a basket of them is probably appropriate like you guys were talking about.

And then we create new HFC and distribute it out to someone, probably a second class of token holder. And, you know, those tokens could be on another blockchain. You know, they could be on Ethereum, for example. So that's what we're in the midst of designing right now. And I saw on Twitter you said something about how people in high fidelity, that their avatars were waiting for, waiting at the virtual bank for their cryptocurrency. What did that mean? So here again, when you grow, when you create a virtual world that has latent economic value, people are going to begin exchanging goods and services that they've never been able to exchange before, basically, because it's VR. You need some way to give out initial currency to people to get things going.

You know, it's a lot like someone immigrating to a new country. What basic things do you give that new arrival, anticipating that they're going to contribute to the economy in some way? So one of the things that we're doing right now is for the existing alpha and beta users of high fidelity and for the new ones coming in, we literally have a bank, and of course this is just also kind of fun, fun way to experience VR. We literally have a bank where you can go and stand in line and collect. an initial small allocation of HFC. And so that's one of the strategies that we're doing right now to cause the economy, to cause everyone to have a little bit of spending money in the new economy, just as we did with Second Life.

And it's the thing that we're trying to figure out the best way to make algorithmic as the economy starts to become large. So Bill Tye, who I know was a friend of yours. And for the listeners who did not hear the episode with Bill Tye, I actually think it may have been my third episode ever. He was amazing. I highly recommend you go back and listen to that episode. But Phil, so Bill told me that you had some interaction with the government about,

it was something like the IRS maybe contacted you when users of Second Life started making real money. What happened there? And do you feel like you learned any particular lessons around maybe like what regulatory risks, stable coins might face? Well, first, you know, as to Bill Tai, Bill is a friend. and I think he's just a genius, you know, just one of the most brilliant guys that is thinking about every aspect of this. I've always, as a friend, just been delighted by Bill because he never fails to come into the room with some big thought about something in economies that I've never thought about before. And that's, you know, having thought about them a good deal.

And we, I used to call Bill my, he was the Allen Greenspan, you know, who always had these wonderful opinions about what was happening with the Second Life economy. And in fact, even had that name. In Second Life, yeah. He was Alan Greenspan, a Gallum, because you had to have a special last name, basically, that sort of made you part of second life. So that was a delight. And, you know, Bill was the guy that, you know, got me thinking about Bitcoin because, you know, we had the virtual economy starting from about 2005, 2003 when we launched. And then Bill, I remember, I think was the first person who came to me and said, you got to look at this thing called Bitcoin because it's pretty similar. you know, to this digital currency that Second Life has. And so we've, we've had a lot of

amazing conversations over the years. And he's been a great advisor on the things that we're thinking about. With respect to the IRS, I mean, one observation, interesting observation, is that because Second Life, again, as I said before, created a lot of new value. People were doing new things in Second Life and continued to that they couldn't do in the real world, the way the government looked at us, I think, appropriately, was different because we were creating new value. We weren't, for example, kind of letting people kind of move from doing a job in the real world to doing it in the virtual world and then not paying taxes. For the most part, people were still doing their job in the real world, but they were also in the evening doing a job in the virtual world

and getting paid for that. So one observation was that the government correctly, I think, always looked at second life as generating value. I was asked one time to come and actually speak before Congress about that, and it was a lot of fun to just kind of try and say, you know, this is what virtual worlds are all about. But for the most part, they were about creating new economic opportunities, not eroding existing ones. And so we actually, I think, didn't have to deal as much with the regulatory impact because there was just a lot less to worry about with things that were being done entirely in the virtual world. And Roon, do you know if stablecoins face any particular regulatory risks? I mean, so what we're seeing right now is that it's not really being taken

seriously yet, so to speak, like I think actually the overall attitude towards something like stable coins and cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is very similar to the to what philip is talking about with how like second life is what is creating value right is like a new economy a new thing perhaps with the added nuance of all the iCOs creating some level of shadiness right but i think overall there comes a point where the authorities will have to really think hard about what the impact of stable coins and blockchain technology will be on just like the regular financial system and the regular economy. And currently they're not ready to do that just yet.

So that leaves us a really interesting opportunity to basically be first with our own ideas, right, our own suggestions for how it should be regulated and how it should be approached. But I think one thing is for sure, and that is eventually it is something that will be highly regulated and highly controlled because it's simply necessary for financial markets to be like that. If you don't do that, you know, it'll basically be just like an ICO, you know, a fest forever, basically. And that's not really what we want to happen with blockchain technology, right? We want it to be something that actually impacts real life and just improves on the current economy. I agree.

Okay, so we're running out of time, but I actually want to tackle one last topic super, super fast. Vatollic wrote this blog post where he, He had this other idea for a sort of stable kind coin that he described as a collateralized debt obligation for issuer-backed tokens. And here's my summary. Feel free to correct me if my understanding is wrong. But a number of issuers issue dollar pegged staple coins with different levels of risk. And then those who purchase the coins with low risk, they will pay interest rates to those who purchase the coins with high risk. and the coins with different risks actually have, I think, different prices, too, if I understood that correctly.

What do you guys think of that idea? And is there any project that's trying something like that? Yes, I mean, this is really using the sort of the traditional thinking around CDOs and just applying it to stable coins specifically. But this is actually, you know, this is a technique that's used, I mean, that was used, especially with mortgage-backed securities to sort of attempt to turn basically, you know, unstable and risky assets into some sort of financial product that itself was actually stable, which of course at some point is impossible, right? Because like if you, you know, zero times something is still zero basically. So like at some point, you know, no matter what you do to a bunch of risky assets, you'll always end up with something that's still risky. But if you take that idea and you apply to stable coins, what you actually end up with is some sort of supercharged,

extremely stable acid, which I definitely think, I mean, Vitalik's ideas definitely, like, it's interesting in a sense that you end up with something that really, like, it's very close to being as stable as you could possibly ever make any sort of acid, basically. I think it just, like, I know that no one is working on, well, I believe no one is working on it right now, and I think the main reason for that is that there's basically too many drop-ax with the system. Like, there's going to be a lack of liquidity, and especially, like, you know, you have to pay a high cost for the privilege of getting this, like, extreme, like, stability that you would get if you, if you purchase the safest of the stable coin CDOs.

And I think overall, like, there's a number of other ways to approach this way where, like, if you're not so interested in fungibility and liquidity, there's, you know, you can use, like, insurance or, or, you know, like, similar derivatives type solutions where you just somehow try to end up with better stability. But sort of as a thought experiment, I think it's very interesting because it just like it shows, I guess, especially shows the power of smart contracts because of how like conceptually relatively easy it is to implement this with just an Oracle and some smart contracts. Okay. Well, I will put the link to that post in the show notes. So it's been fantastic having you both on his guests.

Where can people get in touch with you or see your work? Well, for Philip, in my case, high fidelity.com is where you can jump into our virtual world. You can download our software there. And though we're in beta at this point, most of the important pieces of it are up and running. And as an early adopter or someone interested in, you know, getting into a new virtual world. and maybe making money there, feel free to visit our website and jump in there and come and find me in World

and I'll be happy to try and show you around. And Roon? If you want to learn more about MakerDow, you can go to MakerDial.com, which is a website where you can just get the basic information. You can follow us on Twitter, which is just at MakerDial to get the latest updates. And if you want to consider joining the maker community

and become an active participant in the project. The first place you should go is to our subreddit on Reddit.com slash R-slash-Mega-Dow. Okay, and for Dow, that's DAO as in a decentralized autonomous organization. Okay, well, thank you both so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Laura. Thanks a lot for having you. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Rune and Philip and Stablecoins, check out the notes inside your podcast episode.

Also be sure to follow me on Twitter at Laura Schind. New episodes of Unchained come out every single Tuesday. If you haven't already, rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you like this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Elaine Zelby and Fractual Recording. Thanks for listening.