The CEO of Australian Bitcoin Exchange Coinjar maintains that stablecoins are due to become a major investor attraction.
Asher Tan has left Melbourne-based Coinjar co-founder Ryan Zhou in charge of Australian operations and taken up residence in London’s Canary Wharf. He clearly has a good view of London’s crypto horizon from his 39th-floor workspace on the banks of the Thames. He likes what he sees.
“The interesting thing right now, what’s on everyone’s lips, is what you call a stablecoin. A stablecoin is a coin pegged to a currency, usually the US dollar. It’s a craze right now,” Tan says. “It helps you transfer money around the crypto ecosystem at a stable rate. But there’s a whole lot of applications or use-cases that could come out of it.”
Stablecoins are seen by some as a safe hedge against the volatility of conventional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Currently, they are underutilized apart from traders using them to guard their positions during bear markets. The most topical of these were introduced after the Winklevoss twins were knocked back by the SEC after their last ETF submission was turned down, only to hit the market with the stablecoin Gemini. The brothers also have their eyes firmly set on the London market as their next potential stablecoin project.
Japanese banks favor a stablecoin method which involves simply storing an equivalent amount of dollars and offering a tokenized version of that amount. Tan suggests that until now, the custody model has certainly been easier than more complex decentralized ways of maintaining a peg but tech startups are now looking for a better more effective and innovative model.
“How do you keep a peg? These are things that usually only a central bank would have thought about five years ago, and now you’ve got tech start-ups looking at economics, and how can you peg a currency to a token. It’s fascinating,” says Tan.
Tan sees dollar digitalization by exchanges at some point in the future as a faites accompli and he is now considering how stablecoins would fit into his future plans for Coinjar, arguing that Europe is the ideal base from which to operate:
“If you go regional in Asia there’s that fragmentation – all the different regulators, the cross-border challenge. Europe is a well-regulated environment, like Australia… We don’t want to create a product and then find out that the regulator is taking an unfriendly approach.”
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