[20211110]IF11968_Stablecoins公司：背景和政策问题.pdf

https:/crsreports.congress.gov November 10, 2021Stablecoins: Background and Policy IssuesStablecoins are digital assets generally designed to maintain a stable value by linking the value to a national currency or other reference assets. The term stablecoin does not affirm that a particular coin actually achieves a stable value. Some consider terms such as private asset-linked tokens as better descriptors considering the nature of the instruments. The top four stablecoins by value (Tether, USD Coin, Binance USD, and Dai) reached around $128 billion in market capitalization as of November 10, 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. Many stablecoins have different operational structures and reserve compositions (Figure 1). Reserve assets backing stablecoins could include fiat currencies, traditional financial assets, or other digital assets and algorithms. Many stablecoins at the current stage of development are primarily used for payments functions to facilitate digital asset trading and lending. Although stablecoins represent a small fraction (5%) of the digital asset industrys total value, they facilitate more than 75% of trading on all digital asset trading platforms as of October 31,