Does Tether intend on increasing its supply on Statemine? 500,000 is almost nothing when compared to the total supply of USDT. Seeking self-sufficiency only makes sense if you're going to dedicate yourselves to this ecosystem.

It's important that Kusama demands more from projects seeking self-sufficiency on one of its common-good parachains, especially since this sets a precedent for Polkadot's Statemint. Take RMRK for example - they are a project deeply involved in the ecosystem with real token utility and value. Even with the current low market value, they minted $65 million into existence on the Kusama network. That's the kind of dedication I'd like to see from a project seeking self-sufficiency.

I personally believe the total supply of Tether on Statemine needs to increase by a factor of 100 at least. Tether needs to show their dedication to the ecosystem and a measly $500,000 is almost insulting, especially when you look at the supply on other chains. You can't just show up here with half a million dollars and expect sovereignty.

If Tether has a comprehensive plan for its supply on Statmine, I'd really like to see it.

Supply on other chains for reference:

Tron: $42.7 billion

Eth: $39.8 billion

Sol (compromised chain): $1.89 billion

Omni: $1.33 billion

Avax: $651 million

Algo: $159 million

Eos: $85.2 million

Liquid: $36.5 million

BitcoinCash SLP: $5.98 million

Good points by Adam. This feels rushed, and Tether is not exactly enjoying the best reputation in the ecosystem, so I would argue that discussing this proposal some more before approving it is prudent. Specifically, in addition to above:

• How will this token interact with USDT as bridged to MOVR, if at all - are there any plans to merge the two and decomission one?
• Are any CEXes already preparing implementations of Statemine-USDT to warrant this from the CEX UX perspective?
• If passed, would the application process apply in the same way to currencies like DAI, USDC, and others?
• The original messaging around this is that the proposal is following RMRK precedent, but asset 1984 has been registered for a while but has had no use so far and only has 500k supply.

I would love to hear from the team on this.

I think that basing proposals on general sentiment is a bad standard to set. First of all, sufficiency exists to protect the chain from assets with more-or-less infinite supply from clogging the state trie with tons of accounts. So the first question to ask is, do we think that the asset issuer is going to do that? For USDT, I think it's unlikely. Second, and this is more subjective, a sufficient asset should have enough "utility" (very subjective definition here) that it'd be reasonable to have an account with just that asset and no need for DOT/KSM. Along with that, sufficient assets can be used for transaction fees, so there should be a reasonable expectation that the asset is not so niche that only a very small number of people would ever want it.

With that in mind, and before addressing Bruno's questions, I should address the elephant in the room: I think we should have made RMRK sufficient much earlier. When we launched Statemine, I didn't have such a strong mental model of this, and it would have been great to have a sufficient asset early on, even if just to test all the features that came with sufficiency. RMRK was obviously the best candidate for that. Not that making an asset sufficient is my decision, but knowing what I know now, I should have advocated for that earlier.

How will this token interact with USDT as bridged to MOVR, if at all - are there any plans to merge the two and decomission one?

This seems like a question for the Moonriver team/community. As a generality, we should not limit functionality of Polkadot/Kusama-native assets because something else has been bridged.

Are any CEXes already preparing implementations of Statemine-USDT to warrant this from the CEX UX perspective?

Yes, and this will hopefully help with the demand/issuance.

If passed, would the application process apply in the same way to currencies like DAI, USDC, and others?

Seems reasonable. As an add-on to the opening paragraph, IMO we shouldn't make people from other ecosystems jump through hoops and prove their loyalty. We should consider the community/user base they have built and try to bring them into Kusama/Polkadot.

The original messaging around this is that the proposal is following RMRK precedent, but asset 1984 has been registered for a while but has had no use so far and only has 500k supply.

Like the previous point, I think we should take their user base from other networks into account.

Was sufficiency meant to be this high of a bar to clear? If it's not overly taxing on the ecosystem, I'm not seeing the downside of making aspects of dotsama easier to use, even if it's not at earthshattering volumes. Frankly it seems like it should be granted a lot more aggressively than it has to this point.

Thanks for the replies.

This seems like a question for the Moonriver team/community. As a generality, we should not limit functionality of Polkadot/Kusama-native assets because something else has been bridged.

I was under the impression only the issuing team in the main eco is able to multichain-deploy a token over with legitimacy (that is what we had to do), so I was convinced that it was Tether that actually initiated the bridging to MOVR. If that is not the case then indeed it is not the concern of Tether.

I want to make it clear that I am not hesitant to vote for this because RMRK had to try harder to get to this stage, but because of my general aversion towards centralized stablecoins and in particular USDT with the non-trivial level of exposure of its reserve to volatile assets: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/05/13/tethers-first-reserve-breakdown-shows-token-49-backed-by-unspecified-commercial-paper/

Now I guess it is up to the community to decide on this - how much of a possible black swan risk does it pose for the ecosystem?

A week ago I would have sad "critical", but knowing what we know now after the UST fiasco, I am not so sure.

With UST, everything went down, and reached far beyond the walls of an ecosystem. KSM, DOT, all were affected, even without having exposure to UST. So in my opinion it stands to reason that USDT, should the worst happen, will have the exact same effect on Dotsama whether or not it is on Statemine and sufficient.

I will like to add that the only technical issue we will have when enable unqualified asset to be self-sufficient is that it will will reduce the cost to spam Statemine network. Attacker will be able to use the unqualified asset to pay for tx fee instead of KSM as well as spam the storage space.

So as long as the asset have a reasonable value and the minimal balance is a reasonable number, it is technical safe to support such proposal.

The whole point of Statemine is to allow people to create their own asset. We cannot accept those asset for tx fee payment purpose due to security reason. But once that reason is cleared, I don't really see any other reasons to make the UX of asset holder miserable. It will simply render Statemine irrelevant by preventing people from using it.

This TC proposal aims to fast-track motion 470 with the following parameters:

voting period: 100,800 blocks

Enactment: 115,200 blocks

Please note that this motion is being passed to the referenda queue in order to clean up the external queue for other external proposals that are currently up for vote. Therefore, this proposal, if passed, would queue the referenda with the normal parameters to be voted by the community.