The post What It Means for DeFi appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. What are decentralized stablecoins? A decentralized stablecoin aims to maintain a stable valueThe post What It Means for DeFi appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. What are decentralized stablecoins? A decentralized stablecoin aims to maintain a stable value

What It Means for DeFi

What are decentralized stablecoins?

A decentralized stablecoin aims to maintain a stable value while being issued and managed onchain, without relying on a single company to mint or redeem dollars.

Stablecoins are already central to decentralized finance (DeFi). Because fiat money is not native to blockchains, stablecoins perform the day-to-day role of moving value between protocols and acting as collateral.

Regulators have made a similar point. Stablecoins are considered essential to DeFi’s operations, serving as instruments for transfers, deposits and collateral.

That dependence is why Vitalik Buterin’s latest warning is of particular interest. In a January 11, 2026, post, he argued that crypto still needs better decentralized stablecoins, highlighting three unresolved issues: the need for a benchmark beyond the USD price, oracles that cannot be captured by deep pockets and staking yields that compete with stablecoin designs.

Did you know? As of early 2026, stablecoin supply sits around the $300-billion range, depending on the tracker and the day, and most of that liquidity remains centralized.

Buterin’s thesis

In his Jan. 11, 2026, post on X, Vitalik Buterin argued that DeFi still lacks stable money that is meaningfully independent of single issuers and single reference points.

He pointed to three unresolved design constraints, which the following sections will examine.

Constraint #1: Stop treating “$1” as the only definition of stability

Buterin’s first point concerns the benchmark itself. In his Jan. 11, 2026, post, he argued that tracking the US dollar is acceptable in the short term, but that a serious resilience goal should include independence from a single price reference over a multi-decade horizon.

That is a critique of how DeFi works today. Even the best-known decentralized designs typically aim for a USD soft peg. Dai’s (DAI) target price, for example, is explicitly set to 1 USD in Maker’s own documentation.

What replaces the dollar is not settled, and Buterin did not present a finished blueprint. However, he floated the idea of using broader price indexes or purchasing-power measures rather than a pure USD peg.

Conceptually, that could resemble Consumer Price Index (CPI)-style basket thinking, where the cost of a representative set of everyday goods and services changes over time, or composite currency baskets such as the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Rights, which derive value from a weighted mix of major fiat currencies. Implementing anything like this onchain immediately raises measurement and governance questions, which is exactly where the oracle problem appears next.

Did you know? A CPI basket measures inflation by tracking the prices of a fixed set of everyday goods and services, while the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights is a synthetic reserve asset based on a basket of major currencies, designed to reduce dependence on any single national currency.

Constraint #2: Oracles that can’t be captured

Buterin’s second constraint suggests that if a stablecoin depends on external data, the system is only as strong as its oracle design. He argues that the goal should be a decentralized oracle that is not easily capturable by a large pool of capital.

In other words, the cost of distorting inputs such as prices, indexes and collateral valuations should not be low enough for a well-capitalized attacker to profit by pushing the system into bad mints, bad liquidations or insolvency.

This is a well-known DeFi risk class. When stablecoins are widely used as collateral and settlement assets, a failure can spill across protocols through liquidations and forced selling.

MakerDAO’s oracle documentation illustrates the complexity involved even in mature systems. It relies on a median of whitelisted data feeds and governance-controlled permissioning, with parameters such as minimum quorum requirements for updates.

Ultimately, decentralization in stablecoins often hinges on oracle governance, ongoing maintenance and clearly defined failure-handling mechanisms.

Did you know? A minimum quorum is the minimum number of participants or data sources that must be present or agree before a decision or update is considered valid. It is used in governance and oracle systems to prevent changes from being made by too few actors or based on unreliable data.

Constraint #3: Staking yield competes with stable collateral

Buterin’s third point is that Ethereum’s staking yield is an underappreciated source of tension for decentralized stablecoins.

He frames staking returns as competition that can distort stablecoin design. If Ether (ETH) staking becomes the baseline, stablecoin systems either have to offer comparable returns, often through incentives that may not survive stress, or accept that demand can migrate elsewhere when yields appear structurally more attractive.

He then outlines several possible directions as thought experiments rather than a single prescription. These include compressing staking yield to roughly 0.2%, described as a hobbyist level; creating a new staking category with yields closer to regular staking but without typical slashing risk; or designing mechanisms that explicitly reconcile slashable staking with collateral use.

Overall, stablecoin resilience needs to be tested against changing incentives and sudden market declines.

What this means for protocol design

For readers assessing decentralized stablecoin designs, or a DeFi protocol that depends on one, the questions below map directly to the failure modes Buterin appears to be highlighting.

  • What is it stable to, exactly? A strict $1 peg is simple, but it also imports USD reference risk over long horizons. If the project claims an alternative benchmark, such as a basket, index or purchasing power, a key consideration is who defines the benchmark and how it is updated.

  • Run dynamics: What happens during a fast sell-off? Does the design rely on continuous confidence, or is there a clear, mechanistic path to restore backing without reflexive death spirals? This has been observed as a recurring class of failure in decentralized stablecoins under stress.

  • Oracle integrity: What data must be trusted, and what is the explicit policy if feeds fail, disagree or are manipulated? Oracle manipulation has triggered liquidations and protocol losses in the past, and Bank for International Settlements research frames oracles as a core DeFi risk surface.

  • Collateral and liquidation realism: Is there credible onchain liquidity for liquidations during periods of volatility, or does the model assume normal market conditions?

  • Incentives versus resilience: If stability depends on yields or subsidies, what happens when competing base yields, such as staking, rise or when incentives end?

Wrapping up DeFi’s stable money engineering problem

Buterin’s core message is a reminder that decentralized stability has three unresolved dependencies: what stability is measured against, how the data enforcing it is sourced and secured, and how incentives behave as yields and market regimes shift.

You can build useful markets on USD-pegged tokens, but reliance on a single unit of account and shared oracle infrastructure concentrates risk. Under stress, oracle manipulation can trigger or propagate shocks across protocols.

As a result, the near-term trajectory is likely to involve incremental hardening. That means clearer benchmarks, explicit oracle failure modes and designs that prioritize survivability over steady-state incentives.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/explained/vitalik-s-take-on-decentralized-stablecoins-what-it-means-for-defi?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound

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Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API

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Turn lengthy earnings call transcripts into one-page insights using the Financial Modeling Prep APIPhoto by Bich Tran Earnings calls are packed with insights. They tell you how a company performed, what management expects in the future, and what analysts are worried about. The challenge is that these transcripts often stretch across dozens of pages, making it tough to separate the key takeaways from the noise. With the right tools, you don’t need to spend hours reading every line. By combining the Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) API with Groq’s lightning-fast LLMs, you can transform any earnings call into a concise summary in seconds. The FMP API provides reliable access to complete transcripts, while Groq handles the heavy lifting of distilling them into clear, actionable highlights. In this article, we’ll build a Python workflow that brings these two together. You’ll see how to fetch transcripts for any stock, prepare the text, and instantly generate a one-page summary. Whether you’re tracking Apple, NVIDIA, or your favorite growth stock, the process works the same — fast, accurate, and ready whenever you are. Fetching Earnings Transcripts with FMP API The first step is to pull the raw transcript data. FMP makes this simple with dedicated endpoints for earnings calls. If you want the latest transcripts across the market, you can use the stable endpoint /stable/earning-call-transcript-latest. For a specific stock, the v3 endpoint lets you request transcripts by symbol, quarter, and year using the pattern: https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={q}&year={y}&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY here’s how you can fetch NVIDIA’s transcript for a given quarter: import requestsAPI_KEY = "your_api_key"symbol = "NVDA"quarter = 2year = 2024url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={API_KEY}"response = requests.get(url)data = response.json()# Inspect the keysprint(data.keys())# Access transcript contentif "content" in data[0]: transcript_text = data[0]["content"] print(transcript_text[:500]) # preview first 500 characters The response typically includes details like the company symbol, quarter, year, and the full transcript text. If you aren’t sure which quarter to query, the “latest transcripts” endpoint is the quickest way to always stay up to date. Cleaning and Preparing Transcript Data Raw transcripts from the API often include long paragraphs, speaker tags, and formatting artifacts. Before sending them to an LLM, it helps to organize the text into a cleaner structure. Most transcripts follow a pattern: prepared remarks from executives first, followed by a Q&A session with analysts. Separating these sections gives better control when prompting the model. In Python, you can parse the transcript and strip out unnecessary characters. A simple way is to split by markers such as “Operator” or “Question-and-Answer.” Once separated, you can create two blocks — Prepared Remarks and Q&A — that will later be summarized independently. This ensures the model handles each section within context and avoids missing important details. Here’s a small example of how you might start preparing the data: import re# Example: using the transcript_text we fetched earliertext = transcript_text# Remove extra spaces and line breaksclean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip()# Split sections (this is a heuristic; real-world transcripts vary slightly)if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1)else: prepared, qna = clean_text, ""print("Prepared Remarks Preview:\n", prepared[:500])print("\nQ&A Preview:\n", qna[:500]) With the transcript cleaned and divided, you’re ready to feed it into Groq’s LLM. Chunking may be necessary if the text is very long. A good approach is to break it into segments of a few thousand tokens, summarize each part, and then merge the summaries in a final pass. Summarizing with Groq LLM Now that the transcript is clean and split into Prepared Remarks and Q&A, we’ll use Groq to generate a crisp one-pager. 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We’ll write a helper to summarize any text block, then run it for both sections and merge. import osimport textwrapimport requestsGROQ_API_KEY = os.environ.get("GROQ_API_KEY") or "your_groq_api_key"GROQ_BASE_URL = "https://api.groq.com/openai/v1" # OpenAI-compatibleMODEL = "llama-3.1-70b" # choose your preferred Groq modeldef call_groq(prompt, temperature=0.2, max_tokens=1200): url = f"{GROQ_BASE_URL}/chat/completions" headers = { "Authorization": f"Bearer {GROQ_API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json", } payload = { "model": MODEL, "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a precise, neutral equity research analyst."}, {"role": "user", "content": prompt}, ], "temperature": temperature, "max_tokens": max_tokens, } r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload, timeout=60) r.raise_for_status() return r.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"].strip()def build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year): template = """ You are an equity research analyst. Summarize the following earnings call section for {symbol} ({quarter} {year}). Be factual and concise. Return: 1) TL;DR (3–5 bullets) 2) Results vs. guidance (what improved/worsened) 3) Forward outlook (specific statements) 4) Risks / watch-outs 5) Q&A takeaways (if present) Text: <<< {section_text} >>> """ return textwrap.dedent(template).format( symbol=symbol, quarter=quarter, year=year, section_text=section_text )def summarize_section(section_text, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024"): if not section_text or section_text.strip() == "": return "(No content found for this section.)" prompt = build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year) return call_groq(prompt)# Example usage with the cleaned splits from Section 3prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")final_one_pager = f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks — Key Points{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()print(final_one_pager[:1200]) # preview Tips that keep quality high: Keep temperature low (≈0.2) for factual tone. If a section is extremely long, chunk at ~5–8k tokens, summarize each chunk with the same prompt, then ask the model to merge chunk summaries into one section summary before producing the final one-pager. If you also fetched headline numbers (EPS/revenue, guidance) earlier, prepend them to the prompt as brief context to help the model anchor on the right outcomes. Building the End-to-End Pipeline At this point, we have all the building blocks: the FMP API to fetch transcripts, a cleaning step to structure the data, and Groq LLM to generate concise summaries. The final step is to connect everything into a single workflow that can take any ticker and return a one-page earnings call summary. The flow looks like this: Input a stock ticker (for example, NVDA). Use FMP to fetch the latest transcript. Clean and split the text into Prepared Remarks and Q&A. Send each section to Groq for summarization. Merge the outputs into a neatly formatted earnings one-pager. Here’s how it comes together in Python: def summarize_earnings_call(symbol, quarter, year, api_key, groq_key): # Step 1: Fetch transcript from FMP url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={api_key}" resp = requests.get(url) resp.raise_for_status() data = resp.json() if not data or "content" not in data[0]: return f"No transcript found for {symbol} {quarter} {year}" text = data[0]["content"] # Step 2: Clean and split clean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip() if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1) else: prepared, qna = clean_text, "" # Step 3: Summarize with Groq prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol, quarter, year) qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol, quarter, year) # Step 4: Merge into final one-pager return f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()# Example runprint(summarize_earnings_call("NVDA", 2, 2024, API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY)) With this setup, generating a summary becomes as simple as calling one function with a ticker and date. 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