ICYMI, stablecoins are in deep shit right now, and the chaos that unfolded this week has left the entire crypto ecosystem in turmoil with over $400 billion in losses from just one coin alone. In these times of uncertainty, we can only trust that we can buy a can of AriZona Iced Tea for 99 cents, the same price for which the refreshing drink was sold in 1996. mossya collective of three tech artists, thinks an (unofficial) AriZona Supported Stablecoin can save the crypto economy.
A stablecoin, as its name implies, is believed to be stable because it tracks the value of another asset – similar to how gold bars once supported the US dollar during gold standard times.
In the case of TerraUSD (UST), formerly one of the largest stablecoins to fall out of favor this week, each UST coin was assumed to remain equal in value to one US dollar. But there were no physical reserves – instead, the group behind UST used algorithms and reserves from other cryptocurrencies to manage the price. that system went to warcausing some UST holders to withdraw their money, and before investors knew what hit them, panic and fear mounted and UST traded as low as 9 cents on the dollar† The sudden collapse of UST has resulted in more than $400 billion in losses for investors in the past week, make people doubt the well, stability of stablecoins as a whole.
mossysolution for the catastrophic sector, a stable currency called USDTea, is backed by what they believe to be America’s most stable asset: cans of AriZona Iced Tea. For over 30 years, AriZona’s founder, Don Vultaggio has worked tirelessly against inflation to keep the cost of each can at exactly 99 cents, playing hard with suppliers to keep input costs low, and sacrificing its own profit for consistency.
As for Mossy, you may have seen their work before. The group launched the “Non-fungible olive gardens”project that brought them in some hot water about copyright laws just like the “Blocked ChainNFTs that can only hit Twitter users blocked by famed (and combative) venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Mossy quietly announced the USDTea stablecoin project on Twitter an hour and a half before all 1,000 tokens they initially sold sold out. We sat down with Brian Mooreone of three members of the artist collective – another member is Mike Lacher, who recently went viral for his AI that judges hard your music taste, while the third member chooses to remain anonymous. Moore delighted us with his (usually) sincere, very serious explanation of Mossy’s ambitions to bring stability to an unstable world – one can of iced tea at a time.
Image Credits: USDTea (Opens in a new window)
TC: So, who are you? What is this collective trying to save crypto through AriZona Iced Tea?
BM: We’re a small group called Mossy, and the last three things we’ve made were all web3 projects. We made non-fungible Olive Gardensand then we did Blocked Chain, an NFT series that you can only mint if you are blocked by specific people on Twitter, such as Marc Andreesen. And now the latest is USDTea, a stablecoin that is pegged to the most stable asset we know on Earth, which is AriZona Iced Tea.
TC: Can you literally plug your wallet into this and get a token?
BM: Well, first of all, I just heard that we’re completely out of the 1,000 we started with [after about an hour and a half post-launch]† That is the strangeness of this world. It was the same with non-fungible Olive Gardens, we quietly released it, and then it was gone in 10 hours I think.
TC: AriZona Iced Tea might cost $0.99, but what about gas costs?
BM: The way the power works is that the cost isn’t super high. It is an ERC 20 token. I bought some and I think it was, you know, negligible, like $4 or something in gas costs. And then, like all other stablecoins linked to currency, you can always switch back. In this case you can burn your USDTea and we will send you cans of AriZona Iced Tea as it wouldn’t be supported if we didn’t actually do that. So we have our strategic reserves of AriZona Iced Tea to use if people want to put it back at some point.
TC: Do you actually have 1000 cans of tea?
BM: It’s 1,000 cans that we’ll start with. That could expand in the future. And if we do, I think we’ll probably be open to outside audits depending on the situation, but right now we basically have 1,000 cans, and we’ll distribute them as needed. We currently have reserves spread across several locations in the US
TC: Are you making these satirical web3 projects your full-time job?
BM: The more we do this, the more it becomes more full-time, but I’d say we’re mostly artists.
TC: How many people are you with?
BM: We are three people. So we’re beautiful… I think the word would be agile. It allows us to make things very quickly. In the case of the destabilization of currency-linked cryptocurrencies, you know, when did that whole snafu go down? We are trying to strengthen the crypto economy as quickly as possible, and we can only do that with a small team.
Image Credits: USDTea (Opens in a new window)
TC: Did you get this idea last week when Terra collapsed?
BM: Exactly. There is something to be said about the stability of stable coins, right? That’s half the word, stable. And then you think, what’s the most stable thing you can imagine? AriZona Iced Tea, you really can’t beat it.
TC: How do you make money with this, or is making money not the goal?
BM: It’s not necessarily the goal, really, but I think at some point we want to take care of ourselves. We are in the interest of creating interesting work on the internet, and that is the ultimate goal. If it makes us money, fine, and if not, that’s fine too. In the end, we’re just making interesting things — making people think, making people laugh, or, you know, stabilizing their net worth in canned iced tea.
TC: How? would do you make money?
BM: These are expendable assets, so it’s more of a currency replacement than, say, an individual piece of art. One USDTea equals one USDTea. There is none that is better than the other or rarer than the other. They are all equivalent to one can of AriZona’s Iced Tea.
TC: But to redeem your can of tea, you have to pay a flat $20 administration fee. What is that rate?
BM: That’s just literally the logistics of shipping. That’s not a way to monetize to make a profit from the transaction, it’s to get you your personalized tea items that you can keep in your own location.
TC: On your website you have the question “what happens if ETH crashes?”, and you say that you update the ETH/USDTea from time to time to match ETH/USD. What does that mean?
BM: It just means that since Ethereum can change in price, we want to match that so that the rate ends up being around 99 cents.
TC: How often are you going to do that? I can imagine you don’t have an algorithm.
BM: No, there is no algorithm yet. That may come in the future – it all depends on how broadly we expand this. We do it step by step. This has been about 90 minutes of launch time, so once we stabilize our own situation, we’ll figure out what to do.
TC: It’s clear that Terra was the inspiration for this project. Do you have an opinion or opinion about what happened and how Terra is dealing with it?
BM: I think our company speaks through the work itself. We’re here to try and stabilize an unstable world, so I think supporting our assets in a new innovative and most importantly stable asset… I think that says all we have to say about that situation.
an anteater Image Credits: MICHAL CIZEK/AFP via Getty Images
TC: Would you say you are bullish or bearish for crypto?
BM: Are we optimistic? Are we bearish? I don’t know. I think we’re exploring. We love it as a medium to create interesting works of art. I don’t think we necessarily have an answer or an animal to assign to it. You can just say anteater, or something like that.
