Cryptocurrencies are cool. They allow you to transfer “money” (or better say “value”) almost instantly, usually with very low costs and without any hassles. It can be a perfect payment method, but there is one problem: volatility. The price of all cryptocurrencies can change dramatically within one hour, not even talking about days or weeks. Because of this, merchants are unable to set their prices in cryptocurrencies, they must convert them to “normal” money, like US dollars or Euro, instantly, otherwise they have to deal with risks of exchange rate moving to wrong side.

This is where so called “stable” tokens can help. Someone can issue cryptocurrency, which can be exchanged to “real” money at any time with minimal comissions. The most succesfull project of this kind is Tether USD token, which is widely accepted by lots of exchanges. The idea is great, we can have stable exchange rate (in case of fiat stable tokens the rate is fixed) combined with all advantages of cryptocurrencies. But there is another important and difficult question: trust.

Usually the issuer of stable token should have enough funds to cover all the tokens, in case they will be sold back. But it is extremely difficult to get a real proofs that tokens are really backed up. You can think about audits, but if there was enough money on company bank account on one day, how can you be sure, that there is enough money next day, or week, even month after audit? And no one makes a proper audits every week.

Taking all above into consideration, I would like to introduce a stable token on Nebulas blockchain: Nebulas GOLD.

It is NRC-20 standart token, which means that it will be supported by any wallets or exchanges, which will support this standart. Price of one GOLD token is always equal to one gram of pure gold.

To calculate current token price, we retrieve gold and NAS prices from reliable sources (huobi.pro and coinmarketcap for Nebulas native token and goldprice.org and bullionvault.com for gold). So in every given moment we know how much NAS one gram of gold costs. This price depend on price of the gold, which is very stable and is little less than 42 USD per gram and price of NAS, which is very volatile, as any other cryptocurrency, and at the moment of writing is 5.5 USD.

Nebulas GOLD token gives opportunity for investors to easily move their NAS holdings to stable currency, when they feel that price will go down and move them back, when they think that price is about to rise. No exchange necessary, as all calculations and transfers are handled by smart-contract.

The reason why gold was chosen, instead of euros or USA dollars, is because gold is an internationally recognised, yet unregulated commodity. You do not have to deal with central banks to buy or sell it, no one can forbid buying gold, no one can print more. So that was an easy choice, which “real” money to use.

Now come the best part: guaranteed provision. To purchase a GOLD token, user must send NAS tokens to smart contract. As NAS tokens have some value in “real” money, determined by their market price, and all GOLD tokens can be automatically exchanged to NAS via smart contract request, we can alway calculate, what happens if all issued GOLD tokens will be sold at current price back to smart contract. This number is called provision and when it is higher than 100%, it means that everyone will be able to sell their tokens at current price. The best thing, is that all this numbers are available from blockchain, you can always see amount of NAS hold on contract, you can always check total supply of GOLD tokens, you can always see current exchange rates used by contract. Then do a simple math and see, if GOLD token is backed up by NAS at full or not.

This provision can move up and down, mostly depending if NAS price goes up and down. Also, a small margin (less than 0.5%, more on holidays, when gold markets are closed) is applied to fair price, to make this project economically sensible. As a big NAS holder and believer, I’ve decided to put 8888 of my own NAS as an additional guarantee for GOLD tokens. Here are two transactions i did: 1, 2. So, for now, GOLD token is guaranteed by a lot of NAS stored on contract, and you can check the smart contract code, to make sure that there is no way an owner can withdraw any funds from it, unless provision is sufficient.

Also, merchants can now use Nebulas blockchain as a trading platform, setting their price in GOLD without fear, that it will go up or down. You just set the price to 0.01 GOLD and can be sure, that it will be something around 42 american cents for quite a long time. When Nebulas wallets become popular, most of the merchants will prefer stable token over the native one. I think it is a very good idea for Nebulas promotion, to stop using native tokens as a “commodities”, and use specially created instruments for transferring value.

Using Nebulas GOLD smart contract is very easy, we have created a nice interface, which can interact with both web-extension and NAS nano mobile wallet. I would recommend you the NAS nano, as it is most secure. Unfortunately, site is not looking great on mobile phones, we will fix it in coming weeks.

Install NAS Nano, add a wallet, open https://gold.nebulas.ru/ in your desktop browser and paste this wallet address. This will allow to fetch your wallet NAS and GOLD balances, but will not allow to transfer them (read-only access).

Next, go to the “Buy” section, check the current price and enter either desired GOLD amount to buy, or NAS amount to spend. Click the “Buy” button, than in NAS Nano mobile wallet select “Send” and then “Scan QR-code”. This is the safest way, while your private keys are stored within official mobile app, and are used only to sign your transaction request via QR-code. Check transaction details and confirm it, in roughly 20 seconds you will see your balances updated.

Sometimes, price can move while you prepare transaction, in this case no tokens will be issued and no NAS will be send to smart contract. Just try again and hope that markets will calm down a little.

Selling GOLD is very similar to buying, just choose amount, check the price and confirm transactions. Your NAS will be sent back to you immediately.

You might also want to check the tab “Info”, where you can see the list of your recent transactions and more importantly — provision numbers. Always check that GOLD tokens are covered by smart contract balance, this way you can be sure, that you will be able to sell them any time you want.

For now, NAS nano does not support NRC-20 tokens, so you won’t be able to check your GOLD holdings there. Developers are working hard on implementing NRC-20 support in the future releases of NAS Nano. I am also thinking about making a safe and easy to use web-wallet, of course with NRC-20 tokens support.

By the way, you can claim small amount of NAS with the faucet, i’ve made for new NAS users. The transactions and smart contract deployment are extremely cheap on Nebulas blockchain, so i decided, that i can make this small give away.

Thank you for reading, let’s build the better digital future together!