Moody’s Developing Scoring System for Stablecoins: Bloomberg

Moody’s, which among other things provides credit ratings for publicly-traded companies, is working on a system to score up to 20 stablecoins based on the quality of their reserves attestations, according to a report from Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the plans.

The project is in its infancy, however, and won’t be issuing official credit ratings, another person told Bloomberg.

The resiliency of stablecoins and whether they're backed by a reliable pile of money is a longstanding issue in the crypto industry. Stablecoins are meant to closely track the value of something else, often the U.S. dollar. So if investors have put, say, $10 billion into a stablecoin, there should, in theory, be $10 billion sitting somewhere to back it up.

The largest stablecoin, Tether's USDT, has been dogged for years by concern that it has not been fully backed. In 2021, Tether was forced to pay $18.5 million in penalties after New York State found that it had falsely claimed that its stablecoin was fully backed 1-to-1 by U.S. dollars.

Moody’s declined to comment on the report.