The word "stablecoin" covers hundreds of tokens, but the label tells you almost nothing. Underneath it sit fundamentally different designs, with fundamentally different risks. Some have run for years without incident; others collapsed in hours. For anyone deciding which digital dollar to hold or integrate, the useful question is not "is it a stablecoin?" but "what actually stands behind it, and what happens under stress?" This post offers a practical framework — four questions — and explains how RUSD is designed against each one.
Question 1: What backs it?
Stablecoin designs fall into a few broad families. Fiat-reserve tokens hold cash and short-term government securities. Crypto-collateralised tokens lock volatile crypto assets at overcollateralised ratios. Algorithmic designs attempt to hold a peg through supply mechanics with little or no hard backing. And a newer wave of RWA-backed tokens holds "real-world assets" that range from tokenised Treasuries at the safe end to private credit, real estate, and fine art at the other.
The differences matter most under stress. Government securities can be sold in hours at predictable prices. Crypto collateral can lose a third of its value in a day — precisely when redemptions spike. Algorithmic designs have repeatedly entered death spirals once confidence broke. And illiquid RWAs — property, locked credit — simply cannot be sold on redemption timelines, whatever their paper value.
RUSD sits deliberately at the conservative end: at least 70% cash and tokenised US Treasuries, the remainder confined to liquid short-duration instruments, with real estate, locked private credit, and self-issued tokens prohibited outright.
Question 2: Can it actually be redeemed?
This is the most overlooked question. A surprising number of tokens marketed as stablecoins offer no functioning redemption at all — they were minted into a liquidity pool, and the market price simply floats. Without a channel to exchange the token for real dollars at par, there is no arbitrage anchor, and such tokens routinely drift below one dollar and stay there.
The test is concrete: who can redeem, at what price, on what timeline, under what conditions? RUSD's answer: onboarded, KYB-verified institutions redeem 1:1 at par, with ordinary redemptions settling T+0/T+1 and no redemption fee. That institutional channel is what transmits the reserve's value to the secondary-market price everyone else trades at.
Question 3: Can you verify the claims?
Every issuer claims full backing; the claim costs nothing. What separates issuers is checkability. Is circulating supply verifiable on-chain? Is the reserve composition published in enough detail to evaluate its liquidity? Are the assets segregated from the issuer's operating funds and held with qualified custodians? A reserve that is simple to publish — a short list of cash and Treasuries — is also, not coincidentally, simple to liquidate. A reserve that requires a valuation methodology to interpret deserves more scepticism, not less.
RUSD publishes its supply and tiered reserve composition, holds reserves with qualified custodians, and keeps them segregated from issuer funds. What we publish is short because what we hold is simple.
Question 4: What happens under stress?
Calm markets test nothing. The design question is what happens when redemptions spike: is there a liquidity buffer sized for stressed outflows? Is there an orderly process for large requests, or does the issuer face fire-selling assets at a loss? History's failed stablecoins share a pattern — on-demand liabilities backed by can't-sell-on-demand assets, with no mechanism between the two.
RUSD's redemption waterfall is built for that moment: ordinary redemptions settle from the liquidity buffer immediately; unusually large requests carry a short notice period for orderly settlement; and only in extreme conditions do temporary fees or limits apply — a sequence designed so that the issuer is never forced to liquidate at a loss, because nothing illiquid is in the reserve to begin with.
The takeaway
None of these questions requires trusting anyone's marketing. They can each be answered from public information — and tokens that answer them poorly tend to reveal it quickly. We built RUSD to score well on precisely these four questions, because they are the ones that decide whether a digital dollar is still a dollar on its worst day. Read the whitepaper, check the transparency page, and judge it against this framework — that is what it is there for.