They are the latest craze for sure.
This website is doing a very good job of trying to track them all. Yet their others not listed on it.
https://stablecoinindex.com/projects/My favorite coming up is BitBay's soft peg.
It's not in the spot light yet because the whitepaper hasn't been released yet. The developer doesn't want too many copycats before the cat is out of the bag. The release date for the whitepaper is on July 13th. BitBay.Market
It will have a much more advanced protocol than any other I've researched to date. No collateral is needed. And since collateral requires trust, the BitBay peg is truly decentralized. Based on the stablecoin website I provided, BitBay would be closest to the 'algorithmic supply stablecoin' category but because it also allows coin holders to vote through staking on what they believe is fair market price, then it doesn't rely solely on an algorithm to stabilize it. Thus, it is sort of in a hybrid algorithm category of it's own.
Since it's a soft peg, it doesn't have to maintain a single value. It can still fluctuate, yet it removes the volatility, and therefore allows for users to circulate it as a currency without the fear of losing significant profit potential.
BitBay's soft peg will be the first peg in the history of crypto that will apply a peg to the coin after the ICO has been launched. This is going to make things interesting because the value of the peg has yet to be set in stone once released in September of this year. how the market reacts to the peg before the release will determine the starting price once implemented.
The point being is that while all the other stablecoins are starting out as an ICO, and as far as I know all or mostly 'hard pegged', then there is little room for early adopters to reap any benefits. Yet BitBay's peg implementation has the ability for people to speculate and potentially lock in a nice ROI by the time the peg is released. As time and interest progresses the developer will be able to determine best starting price.
BitBay's peak price was just over 0.40 USD in January of 2018. Currently it's selling around 0.022 USD. The developer has mentioned that it won't be anywhere near it's current value.
There are many benefits of being a soft peg over a hard peg. My main curiosity comes from the comparison of how day traders can use a soft peg to their advantage over a hard peg in regards to strategically hedging their capital back and forth between other 'volatile' cryptocurrencies. A soft peg allows for the trader to hedge in a way that opens the possibility of higher ROI compared to a hard pegged currency, because the price of a soft peg can fluctuate while hedging. And with the current state of the industries price movement being in a prodominantly positive correlation to the price movement of Bitcoin, then the idea that BitBay can provide a higher ROI from hedging would be the natural result, i.e., if Bitcoin goes down in value, demand for BitBay will go up and drive price up. And visa versa, when Bitcoin goes up in value, hedgers would return back to Bitcoin (and others). The early bird trader would catch the biggest worm in the process of it all. Where as a hard peg only secures your capital at the expense of a loss due to market spread and trade fees.
There are so many other things to discuss about it's design. But the main purpose of the matter is that BitBay will be the first coin in the industry to have solved Crypto 1.0 and Crypto 2.0, which are the ability to trustlessly remove the middleman in it's entirety, and the ability to stabilize the price so that it can actually be used as a currency.
Again, 2 weeks till the whitepaper is released. So far the BitBay developer has yet to see any other stablecoin whitepaper remotely close to his approach at solving volatility in a trustless manner.
BitBay.Market
Once the paper is released BitBay will go in full marketing mode for it.
