Published in ChainArgos·4 days agoTUSD: The Early Days & SBFWe’ve written a lot about the TrueUSD. Now we are going to look at the early days. In Jan 2019 they changed contracts. The legacy TUSD contract is here. There are still about $200 million of these sitting around. …Stable Coin4 min readStable Coin4 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Mar 14TUSD: WTAFWe’ve written about the TrueUSD before. About how their highly-organized redemption process makes it easier to de-anonymize addresses and confirm the product has a small number of large users. Also how it has, um, laundry-machine-esque characteristics. Now it’s time to dig in to some of the corporate insanity. And potential…Stable Coin4 min readStable Coin4 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Mar 5Circle’s New AttestationsCircle just released their first Deloitte-produced attestation here. This document, oddly, covers both the 17th and 31st Jan 2023. We can learn quite a bit from a close reading. This extends work done here with respect to wording in the document and here with respect to Circle’s internal mechanics. The…Stable Coin5 min readStable Coin5 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Mar 1Stablecoin Mechanics 4: USDD’s Origin Story & StatisticsUSDD was announced 21 April 2022 as a Justin Sun project that intended to offer a decentralized USD-pegged stablecoin. A fair amount of news coverage resulted with some details. The original blog post has been deleted but is still visible via the wayback machine. That original blog post clearly stated: …Stable Coin5 min readStable Coin5 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Feb 24Stablecoin Attestation Deep DivePaxos and Circle publish similar attestation reports for stablecoin reserves. And in both cases a lot of folks seem confused by what the numbers mean. Terminology in finance is often needlessly jargon-laden or unclear. Here we are going to go through these reports in detail and explain what the words…Stable Coin6 min readStable Coin6 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Updated Feb 22A Bridge Too Few: USDT EditionSome of our earlier work on the Binance-Peg pseudo-token-bridge led to regulatory action basically shutting down the 3rd largest stablecoin. We were just trying to understand how that coin worked. But, with stablecoin token bridges in the headlines, there is more to say in this area. Binance should have done…Stable Coin3 min readStable Coin3 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Feb 19BUSD’s $ Did Not Go Anywhere OddSince BUSD was somewhat-shut-down on 13 Feb 2023 the market cap has started to drop. Many theories are flying around as to where this money is going or if it is being used to pump various prices. We are going to present a remarkably simple theory: the $ moved to…Stable Coin3 min readStable Coin3 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Feb 13Lessons From USDC’s Massive Mint-Burn CyclesUSDC recently saw a massive 12-hour cycle of minting and burning, windmilling about $5 billion of tokens. There were press reports of some panic which seem to have originated with this tweet. In reality the same quantity was minted and burned suggesting something far milder happened. Here is the net…Stable Coin6 min readStable Coin6 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Jan 17Further Binance-Peg Token ProblemsIn previous work we established that the Binance-Peg tokens have had management issues for quite some time. Bloomberg News got Binance to confirm the analysis was correct. Bloomberg quotes a Binance spokesperson as saying: Recently, the process has been much improved with enhanced discrepancy checks to ensure it’s always backed…Binance7 min readBinance7 min read
Published in ChainArgos·Jan 2Binance-Peg BUSD Was Often UndercollateralizedBinance runs their own bridge-esque setup which produces Binance-Peg tokens. These are tokens on a range of non-ETH blockchains backed by ERC20 tokens stored on ETH in a specific wallet. The process is described here. The wallet on ETH is here. BUSD on BSC/BNB Smart Chain — the geth-fork chain…Binance5 min readBinance5 min read
