A stable coin is a type of cryptocurrency that is kept stable by being tied to some other assets value.

But before we look at that more closely, let's back up for a second to orient ourselves

in a space that is fast-moving and at times more than a little bit opaque to folks not directly

involved with the world of cryptocurrencies and increasingly adjacent fields like finance.

Cryptocurrency is a type of digital currency that uses strong cryptography to keep transactions secure.

Usually banks and other massive, well-funded institutions perform this function,

but in the case of cryptocurrency,

it's the cryptography that does so. Some cryptocurrencies are partially or entirely decentralized,

in that those who own some of the cryptocurrency or work to produce more of it,

perform the processing functions, usually performed by banks.

In the case of Bitcoin, for instance, the act of mining for Bitcoin, which involves setting

your computer up in such a way that it provides processing power to the task of trying to acquire

new coins, often using gobs of energy to make that computation happen. That processing power is

combined with processing power from other Bitcoin miners to perform the validation required

to ensure no one is manipulating the system. It keeps anyone from just writing some code that says

they have a billion bitcoins and having the decentralized network,

which is spread around the world on the computers of folks who use Bitcoin, believing that lie.

Validation processes prevent that. Bitcoin is actually considered to be the first

decentralized cryptocurrency, and it landed back in 2009. Since then, thousands of other cryptocurrencies of

various shapes and sizes have emerged, most of them predicated in some way on what's called

the blockchain, software that links a bunch of records together in such a way that they can

show things like ownership of cryptocoins, transactions that have occurred,

...