Stablecoins
Stablecoins look simple from the outside: a token that's always worth about one dollar. Underneath, three fundamentally different engineering approaches compete to deliver that promise, each trading off decentralization, capital efficiency, and robustness in different ways. This course goes past the one-line pitch and into the actual mechanics: how custodial reserves back a token, how over-collateralized vaults absorb crypto volatility, how algorithmic designs try to replace collateral with incentives, why each design fails in a different way when it fails, and why the arbitrage loop that's supposed to hold a peg in place only works when redemption is reliable. It closes with why stablecoins sit at the center of DeFi's plumbing, and why that centrality turns a single stablecoin's failure into an ecosystem-wide event.