On Jan 3rd 2009, Bitcoin set out the journey to create a decentralised financial system without government backed currencies. Today, at more than $115 billion market cap, it has become more like the digital gold reserve than a currency used for medium of exchange and financial unit of account. The volatility of exchange rates between cryptocurrencies from the virtual world with value from the physical world makes the prospect of creating a healthy blockchain economy difficult.
The goal of the protocol of Meter is to complete the mission of Bitcoin and create a stateless financial infrastructure to enable the development of the cryptocurrency economy. It is a fully decentralised, permissionless public chain and Meter is the stable cryptocurrency on the chain that provides a relatively stable currency reference to values from the physical world. Meter uses the cost of production and the miners’ arbitraging behaviour in a proof-of-work system as the key feedback to establish a long-term equilibrium price for the market. Such equilibrium price essentially anchors the unit of accounting in the Meter system to the global competition of electricity prices, which is more stable in real value than any fiat currencies in the world based on the historical data. Meter eliminates the burden on dApps developers to dynamically price their goods or services based on off-chain exchange prices, which is not only difficult to implement properly, but also extremely confusing to customers. The protocol of Meter aims to lay the foundation for a stable cryptocurrency reference that will pave the way for more sophisticated financial services and instruments like lending, insurance, options and derivatives to be built correctly.
Meter is not pegged to the U.S. dollar or any other fiat currency issued by a sovereign country. Instead, it is built on top of its own economy and its proof-of-work interactions with the physical world.
Meter is not competing with Ethereum or other public blockchains, though it is compatible with existing Ethereum dApps and can function as a side chain to most public chains. Developers can interact with and use Meter as a reference for their dApps’ native public chains through Meter’s cross-chain adaptors and SDKs. Each public chain runs its own consensus and scaling and implements its own incentive schemes while Meter focuses on proper monetary policy, inter-chain communications and settlements of value.
