CEO Daniel Popa Sheds Light on Anchor’s Proprietary Value Peg

Digfin is a leading media outlet which covers digital finance and fintech for an Asia-based audience. Daniel Popa, Anchor founder and CEO, decided to contribute to their website with cover story, offering his expert insight on investing in economic growth, safeguarding against economic vulnerabilities, Facebook’s Libra and how we can for the first time, measure the value of money with Anchor’s proprietary “monetary measurement unit”, or MMU. Like another project in the making, Facebook’s Libra, Anchor’s algorithm uses inputs from leading world currencies and major bond-market yields. But unlike Libra, Anchor’s most important input is GDP movements from 190 countries, using data sourced from institutions or companies such as the World Bank and Bloomberg. “This gives it intrinsic stability,” Daniel said, in contrast to other stablecoins.

The MMU index data tracks back 25 years to when Eastern European countries ditched Communism and joined the liberal world. Since then, global growth in real terms (adjusted for inflation) has been 0.4% to 0.5%, on a 25-year average. Popa says Anchor’s value is tied to this absolute economic growth, instead of the vagaries of fiat currencies or commodities (whose value also vary over time against the dollar, making them unpredictable).

Daniel tells DigFin how he hopes Libra also gets off the ground, which has many structural similarities but is fundamentally valued on fiat currencies. “The more participants, the sooner we get mass adoption of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins,” he said, adding that he expects other big corporations to enter the fray.