[Discussion] Nusafe - Hedging 50k tier 4 funds in USD

He gets the interest, paid by Nu, and his collateral back. Again, in BTC, PPC, NBT… Anything at current prices can do as a payment gateway.

Whatever BTC price does, Dhume stores Nu 50k USD flat. As a “NuSafe” like he called it.

So we are buying back nbt then offering to sell dhume nbt for cheap for no reason? He could also just take the btc and walk away. Are we then willing to offer the interest to anyone who can put up $50k? So then we’re just selling nbt for <$1 to anyone.

Without collateral or punishment for default, dhume has no contract. The only way this would work is if we gave dhume $50k minus the reward and expected him to pay back $50k at the end, which would of course make it pointless for dhume.

So your proposal still has the collateral? How is it different from dhume’s then?

It might work if we do this:

Dhume buys 50k nbt and burns it. Nu pays dhume $45k btc. If Nu asks, dhume supports the buy side. At the end of the contract, Nu pays dhume an additional $10k (plus any $$ used supporting the peg) as long as he supported the buy side during the contract. Therefore, dhume fronts $50k and gets paid $5k total. No collateral used. (The numbers aren’t right, but you get the idea)

Sorry if that’s what you were saying. Basically, Nu doesn’t have any risk and dhume gets paid for the risk management.

I thought I might have got lost, but this last post finally found me :smile:
With this proposal @Dhume has quite an incentive to stick to the agreement.
He only needs to get sufficient compensation for the risk management to make the deal.
Sounds like a potential win-win situation for @Dhume and Nu!

That is exaclty what is described in the other thread and marked as “Value of funds received in BTC” if you take a closer look at the spreadsheet

Yes it’s alright, I think I have not made it very clear on the other thread and that other members are generally not absorbing it either, but I really don’t know how to express it simpler. Improvements on the explanation are welcome.

That is my issue. What we are saying is subtly different. In my new model the burned NBT are not collateral, they are gone forever. The custodian ends the contract simply by not providing funds when Nu asks, thereby sacrificing both the reward and the difference between the NBT burned and the worth of the btc at the beginning of the contract.

I don’t think that works, if BTC goes to 0 the loss for the custodian is the 100% of the investment. The point is that BTC disappears from the picture after the payment is made. It is only a payment method.

Sorry guys I’m not following it at all.

Going to see if I get it with @Nagalim example to see if I understand.

So I buy 50k NBT and burn it, essentially Nu owes me 50k USD now (assuming 1nbt is 1usd).
Nu then gives me back BTC for 45k worth. Nu now only owes me 5k USD worth (which is essentially collateral).
Nu pays me 10k USD back after service has ended 5k of that is money Nu owes me and 5k is the accumulated interest + any additional funds I used buying NBT, and I’m assuming I’m transferring the NBT I buy back to Nu since I’m getting reimbursed for them.

Essentially Nu pays me BTC to burn 50k Nubits.
Then holds 5k of value as collateral for the “promise” that I will support the buy side with the 45k BTC I bought from Nu at a premium and if doing so successful for X amount of time I receive a fee (the additional 5k in your example) + a refund of the Nubit I buy and return to Nu. If I don’t deliver Nu walks away with a reduction of the money supply worth of 50K USD at the price of 45k USD (in BTC).

While this seems to make sense I can’t follow the logic:

  1. When I buy 50k worth of Nubit it comes from our sell walls who are then out of balance and will need to be restocked, with funds from T4 and higher. So essentially I buy Nubit for 50k worth from T4 (and thus no reduction of outstanding NBT).
  2. T4 gets an additional 50k worth of BTC and gives me back 45k BTC worth.
  3. Net result is an 5k worth of BTC increase in our T4 and an outstanding debt of 5k to me.
  4. I then use the BTC (which I originally already had) to support buy side when needed.
  5. I get paid a fee over the service I provide + back my collateral when service ends.

This is nothing more than liquidity provision similar to how is done with our pools. Only in a much more inefficient way. Essentially you just pay me a fee for the liquidity I provide. It doesn’t solve our problem of BTC volatility but just increases it. Imagine BTC dropping 80% now nu additionally owes me 5k USD worth in BTC while the BTC they acquired from me buying NBT in step one was 80% more expensive. We’re essentially paying a fee for my liquidity provision + taking a 5k long position in BTC. This is how I gathered it worked from @Nagalim example, am I misunderstanding something? @ttutdxh

Yah, basically you’re right as far as I can tell.

The problem with @ttutdxh’s proposal is that we cannot actually sell the NBT for USD since we can’t hold it ourselves. Which makes Nu inherently weird. We’re selling a product for 1 USD each but can’t actually accept the USD. If Nu grows exponentially and thus T4 growing significantly it would be wise to have an array of different hedging tools (unless we could actually hold USD, which we can’t since we’re not an official legally recognized entity). I imagine part will be hold by custodians giving up collateral (like my proposal), part will be hold in competitive products which have proven themselves like Nubits and part in crypto that will be exposed to volatility.

But who knows maybe Bitcoin is so big in a few years it might actually be pretty stable :smile:

Point by point on your list:

  1. The NBT does not necessarily come from sell side, and if so it should not be a problem.
  2. As detailed in the link, NBT may or may not come from T4, so T4 status is not a concern.
  3. Let’s work it out with an example:
    Assumptions: T4 is 200 BTC, you burn 50k NBT, BTC price is $400.
    T4 pays you the equivalent to your burn less the collateral. 45k USD in BTC = 112.5 BTC.
    112.5 BTC are sent to you as a payment for the USD value($45k). You can sell the BTC now/keep it/trade it/ whatever, but at the end of the day you don’t owe 112.5 BTC, you owe $45k USD
    T4 is now 87.5 BTC and $45k that you “store”.
  4. [quote=“Dhume, post:45, topic:3169”]
    I then use the BTC (which I originally already had) to support buy side when needed.
    [/quote]
    Yes, this is necessary to prove you own the money AND to store the value in Nu (when you burn the NBT, and remove the value from NBT “value as a whole”)

5.- Yes, but you only locked $5k NBT to earn $5k NBT. That’s a 100% return, not bad. The rest of the money ($45k) is on your pocket and you can buy/invest in something else given that you can get your money back if asked by Nu.
The point is that you have control over the capital, you don’t have to trust the $50k you would lock in a bank deposit, only $5k.

Yes we can! This is solved with the proposal! That is the main point of that complicated contract!
When we get the USD we can pay them as BTC (our only anonymous, trustless, payment method) and the receiver exchanges it back to USD as explained in point 3. It is the replacement of a Nu bank account receiving and sending wire transfers. The wire is made over BTC. Do I explain myself?

For what it’s worth, I still agree with dhume but have no new descriptions to add to the conversation.

[quote=“ttutdxh, post:49, topic:3169, full:true”]Point by point on your list:

  1. The NBT does not necessarily come from sell side, and if so it should not be a problem.
  2. As detailed in the link, NBT may or may not come from T4, so T4 status is not a concern.
  3. Let’s work it out with an example:
    Assumptions: T4 is 200 BTC, you burn 50k NBT, BTC price is $400.
    T4 pays you the equivalent to your burn less the collateral. 45k USD in BTC = 112.5 BTC.
    112.5 BTC are sent to you as a payment for the USD value($45k). You can sell the BTC now/keep it/trade it/ whatever, but at the end of the day you don’t owe 112.5 BTC, you owe $45k USD
    T4 is now 87.5 BTC and $45k that you “store”.[/quote]
    Explain to me where the Nubits that I need to buy come from? Either I buy from sell side or directly from T4. If I buy 50k Nubit from sell side it will lead to an 50k imbalance which prompts us to sell Nubits from T4 to our lower tiers to rebalance. Inevitably these BTC end up back in our T4 again. Obviously if I buy directly from T4 (or @jordanlee which is T4 ofc) T4 also ends up with my BTC.
    The only way to not end up with the BTC in our T4 is essentially me buying them from someone else who already holds 50K NBT and wants to sell them. This however is not storing USD value with me but just performing a 50K NBT buyback.

[quote]Yes, this is necessary to prove you own the money AND to store the value in Nu (when you burn the NBT, and remove the value from NBT “value as a whole”)
5. Yes, but you only locked $5k NBT to earn $5k NBT. That’s a 100% return, not bad. The rest of the money ($45k) is on your pocket and you can buy/invest in something else given that you can get your money back if asked by Nu.
The point is that you have control over the capital, you don’t have to trust the $50k you would lock in a bank deposit, only $5k.[/quote]
No, I just bought 45k USD worth of BTC from T4 for 50k USD worth of Nubits. Your confusing a Nubit buyback with my proposal.

[quote]
Yes we can! This is solved with the proposal! That is the main point of that complicated contract!
When we get the USD we can pay them as BTC (our only anonymous, trustless, payment method) and the receiver exchanges it back to USD as explained in point 3. It is the replacement of a Nu bank account receiving and sending wire transfers. The wire is made over BTC. Do I explain myself?[/quote]
Lets use your example: [quote]Assumptions: T4 is 200 BTC, you burn 50k NBT, BTC price is $400.
T4 pays you the equivalent to your burn less the collateral. 45k USD in BTC = 112.5 BTC.
112.5 BTC are sent to you as a payment for the USD value($45k). You can sell the BTC now/keep it/trade it/ whatever, but at the end of the day you don’t owe 112.5 BTC, you owe $45k USD[/quote]
The problem is your assumption where I burn 50k NBT, before I can burn it I need to actually buy 50k NBT first. Where does this Nubit come from if not from Nu? The only way to do it would be to buy from someone else but where does this Nubit come from? Eventually it always ends up back around with Nu getting the 50k in BTC in T4.

Or I essentially buy up 50k worth of Nubit that we have not actually sold but credited to people for services provided (like our liquidity providers). In that scenario my BTC doesn’t actually end up in T4 but is just a reduction of our outstanding Nubit supply. This is the equivalent of a share buyback, it essentially is also a form of value storing but it directly decreases our T4 reserves. My proposal is not meant to decrease our reserves (which we do by NSR buyback) but to store 50k of the value of the T4 funds (recently set to be held at 15% of the outstanding Nubit supply).
We need to have a T4 reserve to ensure we always have funds to backup our buy side to maintain the PEG, you are essentially proposing to reduce our T4 reserves by buying back Nubits that people are not selling.

Right, sell side. Ideally open market, the only way Nu can be self-sustainable. Right now it is not, we only have expenses. Right now we don’t have the ideal liquidity walls, so T4 (Nu) pays for it. That is a problem with the current Nu situation, again not with DR (I decided to name it to try to make it simpler to refer to).
If that is a problem we should not let anyone buy NBT, as they decrease sell side and T4. Does that mean we have to stop people to buy NBT? Isn’t that the base of this DAC, selling NBT?

I don’t see the problem.

The burning destroys the $50k the DR custodian is bringing in, to make the net result in Nu balance 0, so Nu is worth the same. When you buy the 50k and burn it we are storing the USD in a debt from you to Nu, because Nu does no longer have 50k in T4 and you do.
Even if you call it a buyback, what does it matter? Does that raise any disadvantages?

It does not reduce T4 reserve. It converts part of it to USD. If people is not selling/trading/buying we have a problem with liquidity, not with DR, because trading NBT should be profitable by itself and we should not have to support the peg given that we use a zero reserve model. If we rely in reserves to much, NBT is essentially backed by a big-enough-for-the-current-volume,-tomorrow-i-don’t-care reserve.

Nu bases it’s inner workings on people actually trading and using NBT for themselves.
Nu has to support itself and normal trading activity. If it does not, we have bigger problems unrelated to DR or NuSafe.

I’m going to try to avoid the myre of what we ‘should’ be and stick with what we are. Let me try to summarize the argument

@dhume proposes to put up collateral and hold USD. We all understand that and the risks involved.

@ttutdxh believes that the perfect collateral is burnt nbt itself.

The ultimate statement that convinces me that ttutdxh is wrong (sorry, nothing personal) is that when I buy BKS to use as collateral the price increases but when I buy nbt as collateral T4 increases instead of the price (cause it’s always $1). This means that using nbt as collateral for T4 operations is at the very least a different process than using anything else as collateral because it couples to the very tier that we are trying to provide service for. Once you assume that nbt as collateral for T4 operations is funamentally different than any other collateral, it’s relatively trivial to come to the conclusion that we are chasing our own tail by attempting it.

Basically your suggestion is impossible and I think it comes from a misunderstanding of how Nu works. I feel that further discussion should be in its own topic since I don’t feel it’s relevant to my proposal which is a fairly straightforward hedge for T4 funds. I will reply here once more regarding your proposal but feel further discussion would be more suited in its own topic.

[quote=“ttutdxh, post:52, topic:3169, full:true”]
Right, sell side. Ideally open market, the only way Nu can be self-sustainable. Right now it is not, we only have expenses. Right now we don’t have the ideal liquidity walls, so T4 (Nu) pays for it. That is a problem with the current Nu situation, again not with DR (I decided to name it to try to make it simpler to refer to).
If that is a problem we should not let anyone buy NBT, as they decrease sell side and T4. Does that mean we have to stop people to buy NBT? Isn’t that the base of this DAC, selling NBT?[/quote]

Our business model or at least how I understand it is essentially offering a stable crypto, we do this by maintaining the peg at exchanges. Your very right in questioning our current profit model, but it’s a long term plan. In the future with an increased demand and possibilities a lot of profitable enterprises will open up for Nu but we’re depended on B&C I feel. When Nubits grows our options grow but as a start up in essence we’re operating at a loss every month which is normal for a new company.

[quote=“ttutdxh, post:52, topic:3169, full:true”]

I don’t see the problem. [/quote]

The problem is obvious, lets imagine me directly buying 50k Nubits from Nu (let’s assume BTC price is 500$ each).

I buy 50.000 Nubits from Nu so I can Burn them, since Nu can’t accept USD (our whole problem) I can only pay with BTC (buying Nubit on a NBT/USD trading pair eventually would still end up with Nu getting BTC). Since I can only pay with BTC these BTC end up in our T4 funds. Nu then repaying me 90% of that lost Nubit value (which I burned) from T4 funds is essentially nothing more than a very weird way of me getting back my own BTC minus the 10% collateral you propose to hold. This is pointless we already have a way of liquidity provision without using centralized custodians using automated liquidity pools.

That means your proposal actually comes down to an argument for using our T4 funds to reduce the outstanding monetary supply (Nubits in the wild). The problem with this is that we’re already buying back all unwanted Nubits (if we didn’t the PEG would break). There are no unwanted Nubits in the wild since if people didn’t want them they can just sell them into our buy walls. To manage these buy walls we have a Tier system. You want to do the impossible, buy back Nubits that people want to hold, how do you imagine doing this? We cannot force people to sell their Nubits back to us.

[quote=“ttutdxh, post:52, topic:3169, full:true”]

The burning destroys the $50k the DR custodian is bringing in, to make the net result in Nu balance 0, so Nu is worth the same. When you buy the 50k and burn it we are storing the USD in a debt from you to Nu, because Nu does no longer have 50k in T4 and you do.
Even if you call it a buyback, what does it matter? Does that raise any disadvantages?[/quote]

We are already buying up all NBT to protect the peg, essentially we are in a permanent state of buyback. Just like we are essentially permanently selling, this is the whole point of maintaining a stable crypto, sell for 1 USD buy for 1 USD. I’m starting to repeat myself but what you propose is essentially

  1. Creating 50k Nubits
  2. Me buying them for 50k worth of BTC
  3. Me burning the 50K Nubits
  4. Nu returning 45k worth of value to me in BTC
  5. Nu having a leftover debt to me of 5k USD value

I might as well just transfer 5k USD worth of BTC directly to our T4 multi sig address. Net result is the same, we’re not accomplishing anything. The problem with your strategy is the first step, burning NBT. That’s not step one step one is buying NBT and the only way to do that is with BTC, which ends up in our T4. You cannot just burn 10k USD worth of Nubit without first buying that NBT. Every sold NBT ends up as BTC in our T4. This is why your proposal doesn’t work.

Alright lets agree to move further discussion regarding your alternative to a different topic.

I agree this is going off topic. I have replied here.

Getting back to the topic:

This is in no way hedging. A hedge consists of taking an offsetting position in a related security, so when you lose in one you win in the other. BKS or NSR is not related to BTC, so it is not a hedge. Is like going long on BKS and shorting BTC. Movements of one are not offsetting the other, so you can win on both or lose on both.

That is why this proposal only exchanges the risk of BTC decreasing for the risk of BKS decreasing and you defaulting. There is still risk, I would say even more given that BKS is not finished.

On the other hand this is a win win situation for you:

  • If everything goes well you fulfill your part and earn interest. Nu pays for the service. You win.
  • If the price of BKS decreases to, for example 3 USD, you can default, buy the 10.000 BKS you originally had using the $50k in BTC you got from Nu, so you spend 10.000BKS*3USD=30000 USD, and then profit because you have the 10000 original BKS and 20000 USD left. You might even be able to buy them back from Nu trying to get rid of the collateral you left!

I do think it’s worth pointing out that the risk of dhume defaulting is offset somewhat by being a FLOT member.

I am not saying he will do, but it would be very profitable for him. That is a risk we can’t take. FLOT is arranged in a way so a single person defaulting is not a problem, this is not.

To be fair, neither is T1 operations. It’s a matter of magnitude of extended trust in my opinion. I think for $10,000 this wouldn’t be an issue. For $50k, it becomes an actual concern.