has anyone published a whitepaper / theory describing how this might be possible?
A stablecoin has to be denominated in something -- that's what it's stable in.
Is that even useful? It would have to be a commodity with extremely stable (everywhere in the world) non-zero price in "real" terms. Potatocoin? Sandcoin?
DAI is currently pegged to the USD but the long-term goal is (was?) to have an asset following a more general notion of stability according to some international index.
I wasn't able to find a source or specifics for that last part but I did find this overview from 2019 that I think looks quite good.
As far as I can tell, "stablecoins" are redeemable for the underlying asset, that's how they keep the peg. Theoretically someone could make a coin that is redeemable for a large basket of goods and services, and such a coin should be very stable, price-wise, against those goods and services. However, this would be a very risky business for the issuer of the coin.
> someone could make a coin that is redeemable for a large basket of goods and services
This would be necessarily centralized if any of those goods are physical, or services physically rendered. If it excludes all physical nexuses, e.g. an in-game currency, one could do away with that centralisation, but it's no longer stable in any meaningful sense.
A huge basket of stable currencies, government bonds, commodities, real estate. It seems like it should be possible to create something so diverse that even black swan events have minimal impact.
How much better can that be than an inflation-adjusted bond? It may be more satisfying in a theoretical way, but does the difference matter, and how much would people pay?
You could peg to CPI-adjusted dollars or the Big Mac index or whatever. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting the peg to hold during difficult times.
has anyone published a whitepaper / theory describing how this might be possible?
A stablecoin has to be denominated in something -- that's what it's stable in.
Is that even useful? It would have to be a commodity with extremely stable (everywhere in the world) non-zero price in "real" terms. Potatocoin? Sandcoin?