Maintain the GARD Peg

Maintaining the GARD peg is both important for the GARD community but may also be lucrative to those who do so...

At this point in time, GARD is designed to be a stable and decentralized store of value that has been hard pegged to one USD programatically. While the collateral that backs up each GARD token will always exceed one USD and the GARD Protocol is currently designed to always treat GARD as one USD natively, it does not always trade at this value on Algorand's DEXs.

In a high liquidity and high velocity environment, GARD will naturally drift above its one USD peg. This phenomena should happen given that each dollar of GARD borrowed is able to "unlock" over one dollar worth of collateral to those who have borrowed it and because GARD has utility in that it can be staked natively to earn protocol revenues. As the value drifts up, this process will incentivize both current and new users to mint more GARD via the protocol and exchange it to bring the price back down.

In a lower liquidity environment, the value of GARD will fluctuate more and could be trading above or below one USD more frequently. In a situation where GARD is trading below one USD those who have borrowed GARD are incentivized to repay the GARD that they've borrowed because they would be doing so at a discount. It may also be advantageous for users who haven't borrowed any GARD to buy it up at a discount and stake it natively, exchange it on other platforms and take advantage of their products, or for users to buy it and wait for the price of GARD to return back to one USD.

Use caution when maintaining the GARD peg.