A stablecoin is a digital IOU for one dollar
A stablecoin is a token on a blockchain designed to always trade at $1.00. You give an issuer real dollars, they mint tokens; you return tokens, they give dollars back. That mint-and-redeem loop, plus traders chasing free money, is what keeps the price glued to the peg. Everything else — reserves, audits, regulation — exists to make that promise believable.
Mint
Send $1,000,000 to the issuer. It mints 1,000,000 tokens to your wallet and parks the cash in reserves (mostly short-term U.S. Treasuries).
Move
Tokens travel on public blockchains 24/7, settling in seconds to minutes, to anyone with a wallet — no bank hours, no correspondent chain.
Redeem
Return tokens to the issuer, tokens are burned, real dollars come back. Redemption is the anchor that makes $1 mean $1.
Shock the market. Watch arbitrage pull it back.
The market price wobbles with supply and demand, but whenever it drifts from $1.00, arbitrageurs mint or redeem for guaranteed profit until the gap closes. Hit the buttons and watch. "Break redemptions" shows what happens when confidence in the issuer dies — the spring snaps.
Waiting for a shock. The line hugs $1 because anyone can redeem tokens for real dollars.
Three ways to hold a peg — not equally safe
The word "stablecoin" covers very different machines. Tap each model to see what sits behind the dollar promise and its historical track record.
Wire transfer vs. stablecoin transfer
The "infrastructure" claim is really about payments. Cross-border wires route through correspondent banks, take days, and skim fees. Stablecoins settle on-chain in minutes. Try your own amount (illustrative averages: wire fee $35 + ~1.5% FX spread, 2 business days; stablecoin ~$1 network fee, ~5 minutes).
Traditional wire
Stablecoin on-chain
Where this can go wrong
Issuer risk
You hold a claim on a company, not FDIC-insured deposits. If reserves are mismanaged or misreported, the peg is fiction. Regulation and attestations exist to shrink this risk.
Depeg spirals
Algorithmic designs with no hard reserves (TerraUSD, 2022, ~$40B erased) showed that a peg backed only by confidence can go to zero in days.
Freezes and rails
Major issuers can freeze addresses, and networks can congest. "Infrastructure" means rules, compliance, and chokepoints — not a free-for-all.
Did it stick?
Mostly, yes — with an asterisk
Stablecoin transfer volume now rivals major card networks, issuers are among the largest buyers of U.S. Treasuries, and payment giants are building on these rails. That is real infrastructure behavior. The asterisk: it only works as long as redemption stays credible. The peg is not magic — it is a promise, plus arbitrage, plus (increasingly) law.