Breaking the Crypto Buck

Welcome to Bloomberg Crypto, our twice-weekly look at Bitcoin, blockchain and more. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here. In today’s edition, Chris Nagi decodes the mystery of algorithmic stablecoins:

For something to have a price, someone else is going to need to want it - you’d think that went without saying, though maybe not, at least in crypto land. Which brings us to algorithmic stablecoins, far-out artifacts of decentralized finance, which are pushed around like poker chips as a way of subtracting volatility from all manner of new-wave commerce. They’re in the news now, most dramatically a protocol called Waves, where a coin that was always supposed to be worth a dollar suddenly is not. That’s been bad news for its users, spurring wars of Twitter words in the rush to assess blame.