Bitcoin Pizza Day and PIZZA Token

6 min readMay 22, 2019

Background

On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer from Florida, USA, reported that he successfully bought 2 pizzas, quoted at $41, with 10,000 Bitcoins.

On May 22, 2019, 10,000 Bitcoins was worth $ 79,253,225, which is 265,000,000% higher than it was 9 years ago, and the price of pizza has barely moved over the past years.

The community celebrates the “Bitcoin Pizza Day” on May 22 to commemorate the transaction. Since then, the Bitcoin pizza story has actually became one of the most famous promotions that interests people from the world to the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

However, it didn’t take too much time for people to realize that the huge volatility of bitcoin, or the overall cryptocurrency market, makes it almost impossible to use bitcoin as an everyday payment method. We need something more stable.

We had Tether and bitUSD in 2014, and inspired by bitUSD, another Collateral backed stablecoin project, DAI, came up to the stage in 2015 and has been gaining momentum since 2017. And we still have TUSD, PAX, USDC, Reserve…

And here we are, PIZZA — USDE, the first collateral backed stablecoin system on EOS.

(Actually, there are a couple of other similar EOS project, namely, Equilibrium, that also claimed to be the first collateral backed stablecoin on EOS. Since PIZZA — USDE launched its testnet on March 13, well, let’s keep it this way for now. )

PIZZA is the governance token in the system, the token holders are expected to share the voting right and the system profits. It gets its name from the Bitcoin — pizza transaction mentioned above.

USDE is short for USDEOS, it’s the stablecoin of the system, 1:1 pegged to US Dollar and is backed by EOS collateral.

Comparison with Other Stablecoins

· VS. USDT

USDT is the most well-known IOU type of stablecoin. It used to make up of more than 94% of the stablecoin marketplace but later dropped to 70% because of the crisis of confidence. This type of stablecoins highly rely on market trust and an early setup on the market.

The transparency and underfunding problems from USDT bother the entire cryptocurrency community since its first day, however, the incredible liquidity of USDT compensates most of its shortfalls. The strong connection between bitfinex and Tether is sometimes controversial. Community members don’t seem to be enjoying the complex networks in behind, but many of them consider the reputation and profitability of bitfinex to be a second guarantee of USDT stablecoin.

The decentralized nature of USDE allows users to be more confident about the safety of their hard earned crypto assets, since all USDE are collateral backed and generated by a smart contract. But USDT stands as the most known stablecoin for reasons, liquidity is going to be one of the most important topics when the USDE team develops its future blueprint.

·VS. bitUSD

BitUSD is the earliest stablecoin with the idea of excess collateralization. The general concept of USDE is basically the same as bitUSD, and the key difference is from the collateral. When Bitshare and bitUSD was just introduced, there weren’t so many leverage tools provided to risk seeking token holders. Seeking higher exposure, BTS holders pledge BTS to the system and generate bitUSD, and of course, use the new generated bitUSD to buy more BTS and continue this cycle. Users pledge with low collateralization ratio and keep it in a low level as the price the rises. Profit seeking leads to higher risks. The risks accumulates and finally, volatility comes. During the market stumbles, Bears hoarded bitUSD with their maximum capacities and cause serious deflation in the bitUSD market. Users who tried to cover their Debt position and retrieve the collateral will find themselves in an awkward situation: they had to repay their debt with bitUSD but their is simply no enough supply. Bears watched the BTS/bitUSD trading pair crashes and refuse to buy back any BTS. Users could have pledged more BTS to supply the market with new generated bitUSD, but Bears are determined and being extremely efficient when depressing the market. The overall market condition was bad, the Bears manipulated the BTS/ bitUSD market and made it even worse. In the end of the story, all Bulls were dead, slaughtered. Bears then started to build their positions, everything feels like a breeze.

EOS is much qualified as collateral comparing BTS, because of its liquidity and market cap, which means it’s much harder to perform the same type of attacks on BTS. But still, it remains the possibilities if the crash is just bad enough. As a result, the team tries to make more collateral available before next winter comes — the good news is, the spring just begins. On the current road map, the multi — collateral system will be introduced in the second quarter of 2020.

· VS. DAI and EOSDT

DAI users pledge ETH in a contract and generate DAI. The MakerDao project grows extremely well since 2017 and is already one of the best projects on Ethereum. The bad news is, it is the best project on Ethereum and the scalability of the overall ETH ecosystem is questionable. We see DAI is working hard to build connections onchain and offchain, creating use cases as many as possible, but in the first place, if ETH DApps ecosystem is not prosper enough, many plans will become a castle in the air. The bottom line is, if something on chain can not circulate well on chain, in the long run it’s not going to work.

Introduced in April 2019, EOSDT is the stablecoin under the Equilibrium project, it surprised many EOS community members as it comes out with a great team and even greater well funded collateral pool — admit it, we love to see money rains. The EOSDT system is also crypto collateral backed, EOS based, and the interesting point is that they allow the Governance token holders to utilize 10% of the EOS in the collateral pool and vote for EOS block producers they desire. Differences between EOSDT and USDE? Well, both projects are EOS based and still very new, so it’s hard to distinguish. Well, one of them seems more well-funded than the other.

USDE / CNY trading pair is now available on http://www.morecoin.com

PIZZA

The system provides collateralization rewards to CDP holders with PIZZA token to strengthen the overall system stability.

PIZZA token holders vote for a management council who will be in charge with various system parameters, such as commissions, issuer awards, collateralization rate.

Users can get PIZZA by these ways:

· The system will calculate the PIZZA token reward for each individual account on a daily basis and distributes the reward every the other week.

· Airdrop.

· The system distributes dividend basing on the share of staked PIZZA tokens (e.g., if there are in total 1000 tokens staked in the system, and a user staked 100 tokens, which is 10% of it. Then the user is entitled to 10% of the dividend).

· Purchase through transaction.

PIZZA Token Airdrop

The first snapshot is scheduled to be on June 1, 14:59:59 (GMT); the actual airdrop on June 8. Token holders will receive 1 PIZZA token for every 100 EOS in their account.

PIZZA Token Total Supply: 1 Billion

Total Airdrop Amount: 10 million

More airdrops are coming in a proper future timing, please pay attention to the official announcements.

Future Visions

· Cooperate with DApps in various ways to help the token circulate, promising a better liquidity.

· Active iteration.

· Gradually open the source code and make it a project of the community and for the community.

Generate your USDE here: https://pizza.live/generate

Website: https://pizza.live/

E-mail: team@pizza.live

Telegram: https://t.me/PizzaUSDE

Twitter: https://twitter.com/usdeos