Unsolicited Commentary on the News
My 2 cents on the story below, IBM/Stellar/‘stablecoin’. I consider the comparisons to Tether somewhere between uninteresting and irrelevant. Structural similarity, yes; practical or functional similarity, not so much.
IBM launching an insured anchor on the Stellar Network is more a ‘business development’ than a technical one. It is very important nonetheless. If entities like IBM (or big banks) start providing anchors in the stellar network for multiple currencies, a bunch of incredibly powerful mathematical “network effects” will be realized. Most notably, the use of these tokenized fiat credits/claims will allow their enterprise partners to hold less operating capital in each supported market’s local fiat and still minimize the risk of being squeezed for cash, true FOREX exchange can be limited to net flows over longer periods of time, reducing the overhead of international operations.
The really crazy thing is that while the stability of tokens from a Stellar anchor is un-interesting from technical prospective, the widespread adoption of enterprise grade anchors in the Stellar network will imply greater stability in the FOREX markets themselves, because the process of settling net flows would filter out some of the higher frequency noise, though to some extent by pushing it into the secondary market for these tokens.
It will be interesting to see how these fiat backed tokens trade against one another on secondary markets, as they can still be expected to deviate in price from the official FOREX rates based on short term supply and demand. I am genuinely excited for a future where we have this data!
Disclaimer: I claim no formal expertise in global financial networks, but I’ve done more math and data analysis on graph processes than most can hope to do in a lifetime; (it’s called a PhD) so I feel justified an asserting this as a modestly qualified opinion, but an opinion nonetheless.
Second and more entertaining disclaimer: I theoretically hold a bunch of lumens because I’ve been bullish on stellar for exactly this reason since I read about their networks architecture. However, I am notoriously absentminded and I lost my private keys many moons ago, so I am ‘technically’ shit out of luck. Lucky for us, these anchors (more likely the banks, maybe running IBM sourced nodes) will probably make a fortune offering financial services that include custody of keys and an enterprise ready user experience.
Technical readers are directed to the Stellar documentation on Anchors to understand better how this is functionally a credit network more than a “stable coin” per se and I suggest checking out this paper if you are interested in math for these kinds of things.