A practical crypto use case: Calculated Stable Loans

We deserve to be in a crypto bear market. The latest bull market was based on cynical speculation in the form of memecoins and digital asset treasuries. While there were all-time-highs, crypto never regained the trust of retail investors which was lost after the collapse of Terra/Luna and FTX in 2022.

We need more crypto products which solve practical problems for regular users (not just crypto whales who can use their bags as collateral in DeFi). Now I know a number of cool people who are creating crypto games, but sorry folks, games are not going to make people take crypto seriously again.

While I'm preparing a more ambitious plan, my modest contribution here is to propose a type of unsecured fiat-denominated crypto loans, which can be implemented immediately as an informal legal contract, but made more convenient by an app, a smart contract or a wallet plug-in.

The concept is simple: let’s say you lend me $1000 in XMR at an interest rate of 10%. Then I'll pay you back $87.92 worth of XMR for 12 months, for example using the dollar price displayed in Cake Wallet. Or a moving average of Coinmarketcap closing prices if you want to smooth out price swings.

Such calculated stable loans (calstalos) have unique pros and cons compared to stablecoin loans, which make them attractive for the retail market. Calstalos would also be possible for coins which have no stables, such as Monero. For the lender, this works out as dollar-cost averaging, receiving more crypto when the price is low. For the borrower, this offers a chance to remain active in the crypto economy, without the extreme volatility risk of a pure crypto loan. And if adopted at a significant scale, calstalos would have a stabilizing effect on the currency, unlike algorithmic stablecoins. At the same time, they avoid the centralization of reserve-based stablecoins.

Of course calstalos would require trust and/or offline contracts. Redemptions would have to be strictly on time if the contract is more formal than helping out a friend. One nice thing you could do on smart contract chains in particular is creating a redemption reserve using a smart contract for each borrower, so that they can deposit funds before the redemption date, which would give both parties peace of mind.

I remained active in crypto since I went broke in 2019, and today I volunteer to try out this concept as a borrower. Who wants to join me in pioneering this technology as a lender? You might gain preferential access to my future startup. When you're considering this, you'll probably know where to find me, and I might contact you myself, but just to be sure, here's a few places where you can reach me:

I already received one such loan a month ago from a generous investor. Now I need more financing so I can focus on finding net types of work after AI ruined my translation business, instead of desperate money management at the end of each month. I'll describe my financial situation in more detail in a separate post.