Tribe-prisTRIBE $0.282

Fei identified the capital inefficiency of crypto-collateralized stablecoins and the “mercenary capital” phenomenon as the main obstacle to designing a fully decentralized stablecoin. The former implies that more capital has to be deployed than can enter the system, which by design limits the growth potential of a system using crypto-backed stablecoins. Furthermore, coins like DAI suffer from liquidity providers always being on the hunt for the best yield and, consequently, have a limited scope of autonomy.

FEI introduces the concept of product-controlled value (PCV). The Tribe DAO governing the stablecoin issued FEI at a subsidized rate for Ether at its launch to generate a pool of Ether as its treasury. Tribe then supplied a part of this ETH with freshly minted FEI in an ETH-FEI liquidity pool on Uniswap to enable trading of the stablecoin. While users can buy FEI from the Tribe DAO, they cannot sell FEI back to it but have to sell FEI on the open market. Stability is maintained through an incentive system. If the price of FEI exceeds the peg, arbitrageurs can sell ETH to the Tribe DAO and sell their FEI on Uniswap to generate a profit.

If the price is below the peg, the incentives Tribe installed come into play. FEI buyers in the Uniswap liquidity pool receive a rebate to restore the peg, while sellers have to pay this rebate and an excess penalty to incentivize the peg to be restored. The further away from the peg the price of FEI has moved, the bigger the rebates and penalties, making it highly unprofitable for sellers to sell discounted FEI. Tribe can use its Ether reserves to buy back FEI and burn excess FEI to reduce supply as a last resort. Tribe merely acts as a governing body with the following functions:

• Appoint Minter and Burner contracts (including new bonding curves)
• Adjust Scale target and allocation rule on bonding curves
• Adjust incentive time-weight growth rate
• Percent reward for reweight peg restoration
• Reweighting any of the peg Uniswap pools

TRIBE and FEI are both ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. The network is governed as DAO and incorporates different roles: governor, minter, burner, PCV controller, and guardian. All of these are also community-governed.

ERC-20 is a token standard most new tokens follow when publishing on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchains for DAOs and is secured by a proof-of-work consensus mechanism that requires miners to mine new Ether. A set of decentralized nodes validates transactions and secures the Ethereum blockchain.

After its public launch, Tribe briefly stopped trading of the stablecoin to fix a security breach that would have allowed attackers to withdraw a significant portion of ETH from the ETH-FEI Uniswap pool. The breach was sealed before any damage was done.

Check out Ampleforth (AMPL) — another algorithmic stablecoin.

Check out TerraUSD (UST) — an algorithmic stablecoin on the Terra blockchain.

Learn how decentralized finance works in our DeFi 101 guide.

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