Competitors
While we don't see any immediate competitors in the Bitcoin Runes design space, as a Bitcoin-native stablecoin with decentralised, self-custodied collateral, we view "old-school MakerDAO" as our closest analogue and inspiration, and BitSmiley (a nascent BRC20-based stablecoin project) as the closest thing to a direct competitor, albeit one with a different technical architecture, a different collateral model, and many differing design choices.
We do not view the following as direct competitors:
USDT, USDC, FRAX, FDUSD, USDP: As tokens, these are "wrapped USD" tokenised fiat. Their collateral is mostly or entirely US Treasuries in the custody of banking partner(s). They are extremely useful tokens and are popular with centralised exchanges. However, these tokens have failed to gain traction in the BTC ecosystem. This reflects both the nascent nature of BTC DeFi and these coins' lack of self-custodied collateral.
DAI: MakerDAO has historically been the trailblazer of decentralised finance. DAI remains the leading decentralised stablecoin/CDP and retains all of a CDP's programmatic characteristics. However, in the last 1-2 years, MakerDAO has hypercentralised its governance processes and resembles an on-chain credit hedge fund more closely than a decentralised stablecoin or CDP.
Ethena/USDe: To paraphrase Churchill, we understand Ethena's business model as 'a tokenised basis-trading fund wrapped in unknown embedded leverage inside a stablecoin.' Ethena's design choices have pushed the innovation envelope in an innovative way for the space. Still, we believe Ethena's CEX-custody model trades high yields in bull markets for asymmetric counterparty-liquidation risk during high-volatility bear markets, and believe Ethena's centralised custody model has limited appeal to BTC-native capital's higher self-custody preference.
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