As you know, the Hive-Backed Dollar (HBD) is pegged to the US dollar, and while this seems pretty good, there are some downsides to pegging to a fiat currency. One of the more obvious ones is that when the US dollar loses its purchasing power, so does HBD. Even though HBD is supposed to be its own separate currency, it is essentially based on the performance of the US dollar and on the various political and economic decisions in the U.S.
Pegging HBD to the most-performant asset from a group of assets
Is there an alternative? There have been various lines of thinking over the years about what a stablecoin could be pegged to. An idea mentioned sometimes is that a stablecoin could be pegged to the average price of a group of assets.
I would like to propose for discussion that HBD can be based on the best-performing asset from a group of assets. "Best-performing" here means that at one point in time HBD can be pegged to one asset and at another point in time it can automatically be pegged to a different asset that is performing better.
This group of assets could include fiat currencies, precious metals, other metals or materials widely used in industry, base agricultural products, and more.
How it could work
Although it sounds advanced, this might not be super difficult to implement. We can expand upon the success of the hbdstabilizer which has been instrumental in keeping the peg to the US dollar.
Such an expanded hbdstabilizer can compare all assets from the group against each other and determine which one is performing the best. It can make this comparison at any frequency desired. It would then act to peg HBD to that asset.
As an example, let's say that the US dollar is down 2%, whereas gold has remained at the same level. It would compare the price of HBD against that of gold and take action to peg it to gold so that 1 HBD buys the same amount of gold.
To take another example, say the US dollar is up by 2%, whereas gold again has remained at the same level. It would then check all assets against each other and if the US dollar is the best-performing, it would peg HBD to the USD so that 1 HBD buys 1 USD.
Pegging on the upward side (when in the past due to speculation some people have pushed the price of HBD to above 1 USD) can be done similar to now - both the hbdstabilizer and the blockchain's HIVE->HBD conversion could work with a peg different than the USD.
In this simplistic theory, this amounts to hedging against inflation. HBD becomes an asset that always appreciates compared to the other assets in the group. Of course, the real world works in more complex ways and it would be good to have more thoughts and expert opinion on this idea.
It's not the technical implementation but the community embracement
My overall feeling is that this will only work if the community at large embraces it. After all, an asset is worth what someone is willing to give you in return for it. If people are willing to sell you 1 HBD for 1 USD, even though the price of USD has gone down, then they are pushing the peg towards the USD. If, on the other hand, they are not willing to sell you 1 HBD for 1 USD because they know the USD's price has done down, then they are helping keep the peg to a more performant asset.
Making an experiment
If there is interest in this, an experiment could be set up to do some testing of the idea. One way would be to create a token and apply the idea to it. Another way would be to take a little bit of HBD and do an experiment with that.
Either way, let's see what people think.
(Btw, if you'd like to help support me do more developments on Hive, you can vote for me as a witness.)