7. Stablecoins

The past decade of crypto trading has made one thing abundantly clear: crypto markets are highly volatile, prone to wild price swings that traditional financial markets don’t typically feature. But what if there were a form of cryptocurrency that was pegged to an external reference, like the U.S. dollar? In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of stablecoins, from the different shapes they can take (fiat collateralised, crypto collateralised, non-collateralised) to some of the biggest challenges in the space today (Tether’s history of legal and regulatory troubles). We also take time to explore Facebook’s Libra (or Meta’s Diem), and how the social media giant was poised to reshape the stablecoin industry until winding down the project in early 2022.