What makes a store of value in crypto
Supply, price swings and custody: what it takes to keep purchasing power, what gives a coin value, and why a fixed supply is not a fixed price.
News
Asset-backed tokens: the kinds, with examples
Stablecoins, Treasury fund tokens, gold tokens, wrapped bitcoin and baskets: what stands behind each kind, who holds it, and who can redeem.
More stablecoins settled on Arbitrum this week
Stablecoins in circulation on Arbitrum came to $4.12 billion, 7.2 per cent more than a week ago.
| Reading | Stablecoins on Arbitrum, $ bn | Change |
|---|---|---|
| This week | 4.12 | +7.22% |
| A week earlier | 3.84 | −3.61% |
| Two weeks earlier | 3.98 | −0.66% |
| Three weeks earlier | 4.01 | — |
How this is counted
Counted once a week from public on-chain aggregates: the supply of every stablecoin in circulation on Arbitrum, added up, seven days apart. A coin bridged to another chain leaves this figure without anyone having sold it, so a move here is as much about where coins sit as about how many there are.
Assetrix DAO information centre
Arbitrum, Arbitrum One, Nova and ARB: what is what
The technology, the networks and the token: how Arbitrum One differs from Arbitrum, from Nova and from ARB.
What a bonding curve is, and what happens when it ends
The pricing rule behind many token launches: the formula, the shapes, and what happens when a curve is complete.
WBTC traded 0.57 per cent away from BTC
WBTC is meant to trade at the price of BTC, and today it traded 0.57 per cent away from it. That distance, not the price of BTC, is the risk a reserve takes by holding the wrapper instead of the coin. Assetrix charges a spread on volatile collateral for reasons of this kind.
USDT gave up a share of all stablecoins
USDT accounts for 58.7 per cent of every stablecoin in circulation, 0.3 percentage points less than a week ago. The next largest, USDC, holds 24.1 per cent, and the five biggest coins together hold 88 per cent.
Assetrix DAO information centre
The holder account now works on the test network
The holder account at assetrix.org/account/ replaces the prototype and works with the Assetrix contract on Arbitrum Sepolia, in three languages. Enter with a wallet in the browser or a phone wallet over WalletConnect. Without a wallet, figures come from an hourly snapshot.
Writing the protocol twice
The bug class that no test suite catches, and the cheapest way to find it.
New Assetrix testnet follows the white paper's launch list
Assetrix on Arbitrum Sepolia now follows the white paper's launch list: three test stablecoins accepted from the start, ether and bitcoin dormant. A faucet hands out all five for free, and a Uniswap pool pairs ASTRX with tUSDC. The deployment of 15 September is retired.
Assetrix DAO has an official thread on Bitcointalk
The project's announcement thread is open on Bitcointalk, in the Tokens (Altcoins) board, and the team answers questions asked there. It is the one thread Assetrix DAO speaks in: posts made elsewhere under a similar name are not the project.
How to tell whether a team can still change the contract
What to look for, in what order, and what each answer actually means.
Assetrix is running on Arbitrum Sepolia
Assetrix is deployed on Arbitrum Sepolia, the test network of Arbitrum. The operations a first participant performs were run against it, and every one went through. Fifteen contracts carry source code, and all fifteen are verified in two independent places.
The router is written
The router is written: a separate outside contract, useful to ASTRX holders in some cases and to liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 and v4 above all. An appendix to the White Paper, Periphery, describes it and is published on the documents page.
The contract code is stabilised
The code of the main contract no longer changes: what goes to the test network is what was tested. Arbitrum Sepolia comes next, and testing continues against the frozen code.
Can a token only go up?
A design question with a negative answer, and what the answer leaves you.
What “backed” means, and how to check it yourself
The difference between backing and a promise of backing, in four questions.
How to prove a document was not rewritten later
Checksums and timestamps, and why a date on a PDF proves nothing.
How to read a token’s supply
Circulating, total, fully diluted — three numbers that are routinely confused, and what each one actually tells you.
Is a contract really immutable?
A claim that can be checked in a few minutes, and the four places where it usually turns out to be untrue.
Strategies: when to close a position
A new section with two strategies, the shared headroom, the rising threshold, and an interactive model the whole text refers back to. A second view of the wiki rather than a new set of terms.
Phase 2: what happens when the curve runs out
The mint curve covers the first hundred million tokens. After that the cost of entry stops depending on how many were issued and depends on the clock.
Why a rising issue price is not a pyramid
A price that only goes up is the first thing people associate with a pyramid. Here are the five features that define one, applied to this design.
A defect in the entry calculator, corrected
The calculator shaped the Phase 1 curve differently from the white paper, so the cost of entry it showed for a point on the curve was wrong. Two pages of this site disagreed about the same point; both now follow the paper.
Why the backing is external, and what happens when it is not
A reserve made of the protocol’s own token looks like backing and behaves like a mirror. What external collateral costs, and what it buys.
What happens when someone leaves, and why it does not dilute anyone
Redemption looks like the moment a shared pool should suffer. In a proportional design it is the moment nothing happens to anyone else.
How the cost of entry grows: a curve, then a rate
Phase 1 follows a published curve to two hundred dollars. Phase 2 follows a rate chosen from a fixed ladder. Both are ceilings, and neither is a forecast.
How to check a protocol before you trust it
A practical order of checks that works on any protocol, including this one, and the specific things worth being suspicious about.
A ratchet is not a stablecoin — and not its opposite
A stablecoin fixes the level; a ratchet fixes the direction of the cost of entry. What that changes for a saver, a payer and a trader — and what it leaves exactly as it was.
How to verify a document with a checksum and OpenTimestamps
Two checks that need no trust in the publisher: that the file you hold is the one released, and that it existed on the date claimed. Commands for macOS, Linux and Windows.
The price corridor, explained with two numbers
Why ASTRX has no target price and does not need one: two numbers the contract sets, the arbitrage that holds them, and what “the price can fall” actually means.
Why backing is protected by a drawdown limit, not a fixed floor
The protection level is not a price the reserve must hold. It is a limit on how far backing per token may fall from its record — and a rule that turns any cliff into a staircase.
assetrix.org is live
The site opens with the protocol, the price corridor, the documents and their checksums. Every claim about the contract can be read and checked from one place.