tl;dr – The Internet Computer’s ability to resist server downtime incidents and large-scale cybersecurity incidents (like happened with Facebook a few weeks ago and multiple other legacy systems/apps this year) makes it incredibly valuable to have a true stablecoin on the IC.
XCT (cycle token) is price stable, but it only has one-way convertibility → eg., not convertible back to fiat. If we had a true stablecoin that could be used to hold fiat value, I’d strongly consider using an IC wallet to replace a lot of my everyday banking accounts. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Longer Version:
I posted the following to Reddit on the day that Facebook and several other large legacy apps went down very recently (Oct. 5/Oct 6, 2021): I’m posting it here to see if some people within the IC ecosystem have serious thoughts on the matter:
Date: Oct 5, 2021
Subject: Today’s Legacy Internet Outages Would Make a Stablecoin on the IC That Much More Amazing
Post:
After watching the outages across the world today – Facebook, Instagram, AT&T, Amazon, etc…I got to thinking:
An Internet Computer wallet could possibly be the only thing in the world right now that removes this type of risk from using the current digital banking services to store money for daily activities.
Thus, I thought “I wonder what would happen if I just kept everything that I was using the existing digital banking infrastructure for and put it a huge amount of it in ICP to ensure that I always at least had access to something digital if the banking systems get hit”
→ I decided that until I’m able to pay for everyday services with ICP, the fiat price of ICP is just too volatile to do that (this is separate from investment in ICP, just talking about pure day-to-day outside world utility here).
But , if the IC had some kind of stablecoin or similar solution, I’d strongly consider just using an IC wallet to keep most of my everyday funds in. (Could hold savings in XCT: then XCT → IC → Fiat as necessary)
XCT is designed to price-stable, and would be suitable if the ICP <-> XCT conversion mechanism worked in both directions.
From what I know, a true stablecoin on the Internet Computer isn’t very likely soon due to the uncertainty around regulations – does anybody have an educated opinion on when we might see one or something similar to what I’m talking about?
Could be some kind of oracle-like solution where the token is linked to a basket, could be a gold or silver / single commodity-backed coin, but something that’s an attempt at a form of money which can be converted to function on the existing payment rails of the world.
Thoughts / updates / news on this, anybody?