Does the Design of Stablecoins Impact Their Volatility?

Abstract

In this paper, we shall compare the average volatility that characterises the main stablecoin design types with a view to answering the question of whether all stablecoin designs accomplish the goal of minimising their price fluctuations to the same degree. Our research is motivated by the lack of rigorous studies comparing volatility of different stablecoin types stressed in the literature as well as the practical importance of such a comparison from the investors’ viewpoint. We opted for a standard volatility measure, i.e., standard deviation of return rates, corrected it for autocorrelation, and detected differences between distributions of the measure in three stablecoin groups using various non-parametric tests, i.e., the Kruskal–Wallis test, the bootstrap F-test, post-hoc tests and non-parametric contrasts. We proved that stablecoins do not deliver equally on the promise to provide stable market value with tokenised funds being leaders. Tokenised funds design involves complete coverage of the stablecoin supply in units of the currency of reference as well as great dependence on the trusted third-party acting as a trustee for the collateral. Our study reveals that existing complex stablecoins designs hardly compete with this simple design in terms of volatility.