“Go for the Jugular” is the advice George Soros gave to his team during his famous attack on the British pound for a profit of $1 billion on so-called Black Wednesday in 1992. On October 15, 2018, tether, the market dominating stablecoin with a market cap of $2 billion, was attacked, breaking tether’s peg to USD, dropping its value by 7 percent but simultaneously driving up bitcoin and the whole crypto market by more than 10 percent. Even though nobody has claimed the attack yet, entrepreneurs, investors and customers of stablecoins should all carefully analyze existing and potential attacks and act accordingly.Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies with stable value, are considered the “holy grail” of crypto since they could displace all the fiat money in the world which is about $90 trillion. As one might expect, investors have poured out hundreds of millions of dollars chasing stablecoin dreams, and, following the money, new stablecoin projects have come out left and right in 2018, which many have called the year of the stablecoin.While there are many good articles on stablecoins, almost all of them focus on topics related to stablecoin design or why stablecoins are doomed to fail, and all analyses assume normal crypto market conditions rather than taking into account the volatile conditions we have experienced. However, during an attack, the market movement is massive and sudden. Assuming these attacks are l...
