Two co-founders of the Puerto Rico-based digital FV Bank say they have become the first in history to be awarded a U.S. patent for a stablecoin design based solely on government debt.
The patent application, filed last year on the back of a pre-existing patent by Nitin Agarwal and Miles Paschini, describes their instrument as a âtokenized crypto asset backed by sovereign debt.â
Its working name is Yuga Coin, which in Sanskrit means the âjoining of two things,â or in this case, âgenerations,â Agarwal told CoinDesk in an interview on Tuesday.
âWe aim to create multiple stablecoins that are government-friendly, Know-Your-Customer (KYC), anti-money laundering and Financial Action Task Force (FATF) compliant based on different currencies,â said Agarwal.
Each coin will be redeemable 1:1 against a corresponding national currency where they will be backed by national treasury instruments (including bonds and treasury notes) of the corresponding country.
Those stablecoins, intended to be created under the same Sanskrit banner and denominated in U.S. dollars or euros at first, are to be traded in a controlled network adjusted to rate the risk of trading with particular counterparties.
The argument goes that these would be more stable than other cryptos pegged to a fiat currency because they are not reliant on a single banking entity holding the collateral. âThe stability of the tokenized crypto asset is more akin to the stability of the government debt,â the patent reads.
While the market is currently flooded with various versions of stablecoins pegged to either commodities or fiat currency (think USDT and USDC), the competition for such an instrument pegged to government debt is scarce.
âAvanti Bank (Caitlin Long) does speak about stablecoins backed by banks which hold all funds in government securities and no fractional reserves,â said Agarwal. âHowever, in order to make this multinational and multicurrency, the bottleneck of a bank has to be removed, which is the approach we are taking.â
A push to become more compliant in the eyes of regulators is currently at the fore of most crypto entrepreneursâ minds in their pursuit of legitimacy. The FATF recently updated its guidance requiring virtual assets and their providers to comply with the same rules as traditional financial institutions.
Pandering to that notion, Yuga Coin also seeks to incorporate regulatory-approved identity verification standards and an incorporated risk score similar to that of a FICO credit score in traditional finance.
Agarwal said Yuga Coins would be verified by a regulated and trusted entity that is later recorded on-chain. Once a person has a verified identity in their wallet, the end-user is then in control of who can view their identity verification.
âWe conceptualized this about three years back when the stablecoins market cap was less than $10 billion,â said Agarwal. âToday we see more people realizing this is the right way to run a stablecoin.â
The intention is to facilitate international government to corporations transactions, inter-government transfers fostering trade, global B2B and B2C transactions, and as a store of value among individuals.
Agarwal describes the designâs potential as possessing âinnumerable possibilitiesâ capable of providing a trusted means of holding and transacting money enabling âmultiple innovations.â
âThis is the only way to make stablecoins more government-friendly that foster innovation in banking, payments, finance, capital markets, and asset registry by using blockchain,â said Agarwal, who also noted the beauty of such stablecoins in their provision of a global, decentralized, immutable, and auditable way of transacting.
âCrypto is a solution to all anti-money laundering problems in the world and this project provides a way to achieve that.â