Canada Stablecorp announced Monday it was issuing the «QCAD» stablecoin for “mass market”, including foreign exchange remittances and other financial products. Canada Stablecorp is a joint venture between cryptoasset manager 3iQ, which recently received approval to launch a bitcoin fund, and Mavennet Systems, a blockchain development firm launched last year.
A new stablecoin pegged to the Canadian dollar may help digitize the North American nation’s financial markets.
QCAD is being described as both a means of payment and a settlement solution. “It allows you to trade, to take positions against other stablecoins in other currencies, USDC in the U.S. for example”, said Canada Stablecorp CEO Jean Desgagne. “It provides a medium of exchange and value.”
The coin is backed by Canadian dollars, Desgagne said. He envisions the token – built on the ethereum ERC-20 standard – as a tool for foreign exchange remittances, among other use cases. The hope is it will become the first mainstream stablecoin pegged to the Canadian dollar to see general use (while similar stablecoins have been launched before, few have lasted).
The token is compliant with know-your-customer and anti-money laundering regulations, Desgagne said. It will be issued by Canada Stablecorp and traded on DVeX, Newton, Bitvo, Netcoins and Coinsmart – five Canada-based crypto exchanges.
These platforms will be responsible for conducting their own KYC/AML checks in compliance with relevant regulations, Desgagne continued. Any investors – including those outside Canada – who can trade on these exchanges can buy QCAD.
While the other key regulatory concern could come from securities law, Desgagne said the company had a legal opinion saying it was not a huge concern.
“It’s worth a dollar today, it’ll be worth a dollar tomorrow, it’ll be worth a dollar 20 years from now”, Desgagne said. “We believe that it’s not a security, it doesn’t need to touch with securities law. It’s really a mechanism for exchange.”
The company built its token on ethereum due to the network’s wide popularity and Stablecorp’s comfort with its levels of security, Desgagne said. While additional stablecoins might be issued on other networks in the future, this is more of an eventual goal than anything being planned at the moment.
Broadly, Desgagne hopes to further digitize financial services as QCAD grows in acceptance.
“I think we’re taking financial market infrastructure that exists in the analog world and create them in the digital world”, Desgagne said. “We believe we’re creating tools for digital assets to truly bloom.”
How MakerDAO’s Stablecoin Survived the Crash, Smart Contract Bugs and Full Decentralization
In the aftermath of the so-called «Black Thursday» crash from several weeks ago, MakerDAO’s «DAI» ethereum backed dollar pegged stablecoin came untethered and was, for a time at least, functionally insolvent. In the aftermath, holders of the MKR token which allows holders to participate in governance decisions opted to do a couple of things, including adding the centralized stablecoin USDC to the list of acceptable collateral, which drew both condemnations mostly around centralized risk being added to the system and praise for making the system more robust against sudden ETH collateral price crashes.
And now most recently, the Maker Foundation which had held some centralized control over the protocol completed their long-planned exit with all authorities now transferred to the holders of MKR tokens, removing both a point of control which had been used as a safety check and a point of risk in that centralized control can be co-opted and used to disrupt a system as we’ve seen in other examples.
