Upstart crypto company Saga wants to issue a new global currency on the blockchain. Just don’t call it a stablecoin.
Saga’s SGA digital currency relies on an international reserve asset called Special Drawing Rights (SDR), which was introduced by the International Monetary Fund in 1969. This is a conventional basket of major world currencies — the US dollar, the euro, the British pound sterling, the Japanese yen, and the Chinese renminbi — that central banks around the world use to hedge against fluctuations in their own local currency. SGA borrows this model for a financial instrument and puts it on the blockchain.