Re: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty Protocol, Client and Coin (built on Bitcoin) - Official
Does any sort of collateralization requirement denominated in XCP limit the total amount of assets that can be traded on the exchange to the market cap of XCP? How do you work out the margin requirement? Or is the idea that any asset in one's possession can be used as collateral, but represented as an XCP equivalent?
In a world with XCP backed assets, one way I could imagine this working would be that the current market price of the asset (based on a price feed) would be locked away when the asset was created, and the issuer would place a bet to cover future variations in the price, up to a disclosed bet size, and future date.
An issuer could choose the amount of margin they want to put up, and when they run out, the asset would be automatically liquidated. This would have the side effect of dumpling an asset holder back into XCP if a market got volatile, but I think it could dramatically reduce counterparty risk, and everyone would know were they stood.
When issuing, an issuer would lock away $1 worth of XCP to create the asset, and might choose to commit, say, another 25% to cover variation. So $1.25 worth of XCP might be locked away per USD token. They could sell the token to get $1 of XCP back, so they'd basically be net a long XCP bet.
I can imagine that this kind of usage would increase the scarcity of XCP and push the price up (so in the next round a unit of XCP could back a larger dollar value of assets, and so on).
You cannot eliminate counterparty risk from an asset-backed currency peg, as there is no mechanism at the protocol level to stop the issuer (i.e. the user with the private key of the address with the XCP backing) from withdrawing funds. I still think though that is a really good use-case.
A currency peg that actually requires no trust is making a CFD on the price of an asset to which you would like to peg your holdings in XCP. The effectiveness of the peg, however, depends on one's leverage, which in turn increases one's risk. For anyone who is interested in making such a peg, I have come up with a few examples which would show how you do it.
Thanks cityglut, pity, something like this would have been very cool
It's still a good service! And indeed I think that if a trusted exchange (or even a trusted community member) were to implement something like this on Counterparty, it would gain adoption.