Market Pegged Assets

"A crypto-currency, with the properties and advantages of Bitcoin, that is capable of maintaining price parity with a globally adopted currency (e.g. U.S. dollar), has high utility for convenient and censorship resistant commerce. This can be achieved by BitShares’ market pegged assets (MPA), a new type of freely traded digital asset whose value is meant to track the value of a conventional underlying asset by means of contracts for difference (CFD).

A SmartCoin (synonym for MPA) is a crypto-currency that always has 100% or more of its value backed by the BitShares core currency (BTS), to which they can be converted at any time, as collateral in a CFD.

What makes MPAs unique is that they are free from counterparty risk even though they resemble a CFD backed by collateral. This is achievable by letting the network itself (implemented as a software protocol) be responsible for securing the collateral and performing settlements as will be described in more detail below.

This is a subset of the available market pegged assets:
BitUSD
BitCNY
BitEUR
BitGOLD
…"