The technical division of Circle has introduced two new projects aimed at combating crimes related to theft and fraud in the blockchain sphere, as well as increasing the use of stablecoins in payments. These projects were developed in collaboration with the Circle Research team and the applied cryptography group from Stanford University.
Experts noted that from 2021 to 2023, approximately $10 billion was stolen due to fraud and hacks based on DLT technologies. They pointed to the "irreversibility of digital assets and the immature management of smart contract security" as the main reasons for the losses.
Furthermore, experts emphasized that the inability to reverse transactions hinders the widespread adoption of on-chain payment tools, such as stablecoins, in business. They noted that the ability to recall transactions is an important feature of modern payment systems, allowing the return of lost funds in case of unauthorized operations.
Based on previous research at Stanford and ongoing collaboration with Circle, developers introduced two new open-source projects. The first project is the Recoverable Token standard, which offers the possibility of canceling blockchain transactions with various settings suitable for both commercial and DeFi scenarios. The second project is the "R-pools" model, which provides insurance and liquidity for the recovery of tokens by their owners.
Circle experts stated that payments in stablecoins are often compared to operations in traditional card networks, which offer reversible transactions and fraud protection. They believe that the open and programmable nature of digital currencies on blockchains will lead to solutions for these problems. In their opinion, the developed tools can be adapted for a wide range of financial and commercial operations, not limited to retail payments only.
