One U is a fixed list of real things held in a vault: mostly gold, with bitcoin, housing, Monad, dollars and euros beside it. Nothing in it is lent or promised. The list is revised only through a published, timelocked change, chosen to maximise purchasing power over a 20-year window.
Measured against W(t), a basket of world consumption, cash loses a little every year and the assets that grow do so with violent falls. A unit of purchasing power has to hold the second kind without feeling like it.
Real compound annual growth, Oct 2006 → Oct 2026, deflated by W(t). Bitcoin and ether are scored over the years they have existed. U is the protocol's current basket held at fixed weights.
Measured in dollars, a stablecoin never moves and U does. Measured in the goods and services the dollar is for, the stablecoin has lost about a quarter of itself in twenty years, and U has multiplied. The two charts in each row are the same money seen from the two sides.
Both columns start at 1 in October 2006. The right column divides by W(t), a basket of world consumption, so a flat line there means the money buys the same amount. Log scale, shared within each column, so a slope means the same thing in every panel.
Every possible holding period in the last twenty years, as one dot, measured in purchasing power. A dollar stablecoin finishes ahead only in the stretches when the dollar rose against the rest of the world's money; over ten years that has happened in 7% of periods. U sometimes finishes a short period behind, and the longer you hold it the rarer that gets.
One issuer, one currency, one country. The price is stable because every link in the chain agrees to call it a dollar.
No issuer. Six things held in a vault contract at fixed quantities, each redeemable at every block. The unit is only as stable as the six together, and no single one of them can take it down.
The protocol's optimiser maximises real growth subject to two bounds: volatility under 8% a year and no 20-year fall deeper than 20%. Move the weights. The same scoring runs here, on the same monthly data.
The protocol is governed within bounds. The dangerous levers were never written, so no vote, no emergency and no exploit of governance can reach them.
A U is redeemable for its listed quantities at every block, including during a depeg or an exploit. There is no pause function.
Per leg, the vault holds at least q × supply at all times. Between revisions it trades nothing: fixed quantities are buy-and-hold.
A change to the list is published, validated against the charter in the contract, and waits a full week before a keeper may execute it.
U has an elastic supply and a claim on the vault. NIT has a fixed supply and a claim on nothing inside it: it steers within the charter's bounds and is earned only by holding U.