The aim of this post is to collect a grab-bag of ideas which I had while collaborating with @apriori on HyperCoW product design and thinking about overall capabilities we might want ACES to have.
Distribution streams in non-XAN assets
Assuming that the governance system holds a treasury which includes some non-XAN assets, distribution stream voting can just as easily be used to vote on distribution streams which are denominated in a currency other than XAN. Care must be taken, of course, not to overspend the treasury, but with some amount of predictability of inflows/outflows this should be doable.
Lending to XAN bondholders
In addition to the zero-interest-rate loan mechanism from the metastability reserve, non-XAN assets in the treasury could simply be lent out to XAN bondholders, where amounts under the zero-interest rate threshold (proportional to XAN bond size) are zero-interest, and amounts above that are either variable-interest (based on demand, like Aave), or perhaps fixed-interest with some negotiation protocol. The loan can be defaulted on, of course, but then the XAN bond cannot be withdrawn. In general it would be necessary to limit loans to less than the value of the XAN bond itself, but assuming that the value of XAN is at least treasury-proportional, this should be the case. An advantage of borrowing in this way is that liquidation is not really necessary – the bond simply cannot be withdrawn until the loan is paid back.
Synthetic credit assets
The cryptoeconomic system could issue synthetic credit assets which are soft-price-pegged to another denomination (e.g. USD, BTC, ETH) via a DAI-like / perpetual-like interest rate mechanism, backed ultimately by the treasury and the ability to mint XAN. These credit assets could be distributed via distribution streams, lent out to bondholders, used to provide liquidity in the MSM, etc. Care must be taken to manage the risk, of course, but the risks can be well-characterized and clearly communciated to any counterparties who accept the credit assets. Having the option to do this may be quite useful, e.g.:
- if denominations are desired which are not held in large amounts by the treasury
- to bootstrap liquidity in an Anoma-native DEX (HyperCoW)
- to issue credits which have convenient UoA properties (e.g. ~= $1, ~= 1 ETH) while backing them with underlying assets with similar trust structures but better economics (e.g. tokenized treasuries, staked Ethereum)