Our weekly updates are put together by folks deep in the crypto scene, giving you a clear picture of what's happening without overwhelming you.
To Watch This Week
AIRDROPS + ALPHASep 28, 2024
Markets
Could Robinhood and Revolut Find Stablecoin Success Where PayPal Stumbled?
Fintech heavyweights Robinhood, a U.S. investing app, and Revolut, a crypto-friendly neobank based in London, are considering launching their own stablecoins, unnamed sources told Bloomberg this week. The giants are eyeing the stablecoin market at a time when Tether (USDT), with its $119 billion market capitalization, accounts for roughly 68% of the $173.5 billion category. With Europe offering clearer regulatory frameworks, the fintech giants could bring a new wave of competition. However, the...
Apr 25, 2024
Coins
Payments Giant Stripe Reenters Crypto With USDC on Ethereum, Solana and Polygon
Payments processor Stripe is back in the crypto game after announcing today that it will soon allow merchants to receive funds in the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin. Starting this summer, the San Francisco-based firm will let companies that use its technology accept USD Coin (USDC) for online payments. USDC is the second biggest stablecoin in the crypto space and the sixth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. “We’re excited about empowering Stripe users to accept stablecoin payments, helping them...
Oct 31, 2023
Business
Retail Investors Can No Longer Mint USDC Directly Through Circle
USDC stablecoin issuer Circle will discontinue support for legacy consumer accounts, the company said on Tuesday. The USD Coin token is a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, meaning that Circle maintains $1 in reserves—in cash or cash equivalents—to back each of the $25 billion worth of tokens in circulation. USDC is the second-most popular dollar-backed stablecoin behind Tether (USDT), which on Tuesday had a market capitalization of $85 billion, according to CoinGecko. “Circle is phasing out support...
Sep 29, 2023
Law and Order
Stablecoin Legislation Looms Despite Threat of Government Shutdown
House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry signaled on Friday that stablecoin regulation is still top of mind, despite a potential government shutdown looming on the horizon. “Things are complicated right now,” McHenry said, speaking over Zoom to a crowd gathered in New York at a forum organized by stablecoin issuer Circle. “But I'm gonna do my best to get this to the president's desk.” Stablecoins are digital assets pegged to the price of a sovereign currency like the U.S. dollar....
Aug 21, 2023
Business
Coinbase Acquires Stake in Circle, Dissolving USDC Issuer Centre
Centre Consortium, which issues second-largest stablecoin USDC, has been dissolved as Coinbase acquires a minority share in Circle Internet Financial, according to a blog post from the company. "Centre will no longer exist as a stand-alone entity and Circle will remain as the issuer of USDC, bringing any Centre governance and operations responsibilities in-house," Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a jointly-authored blog post. The announcement added that revenue...
Apr 19, 2023
Business
Congress Is 'Starting From Scratch' on Stablecoin Legislation
Members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee turned their attention to stablecoins Wednesday, picking up where they left off on regulation pushed back last year. But lawmakers said any progress made since then is tenuous at best. FSC ranking member Maxine Waters (D-CA) suggested that lawmakers are “starting from scratch” after Republicans made alterations to a bill that died on the vine last year ahead of the midterm election called the Stablecoin TRUST Act. Lawmakers’ most recent pass...
Mar 11, 2023
Coins
Circle To ‘Stand Behind’ USDC, Cover $3.3 Billion Shortfall Held in Silicon Valley Bank
USDC stablecoin issuer Circle has claimed that it will “cover any shortfall” caused as a result of the $3.3 billion in its funds held by the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank. In a blog post, Circle wrote that the company is legally obliged to “stand behind” USDC and will cover any shortfall using corporate resources—and "external capital if necessary"—to ensure that the stablecoin can be redeemed at a ratio of 1 for 1 with the U.S. Dollar. CEO Jeremy Allaire reiterated the commitment in a Twitter t...
Jan 10, 2023
Business
Crypto.com Will Delist Tether in Canada to Comply With Ontario Regulator
Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com will no longer facilitate transactions involving Tether in Canada and plans to delist the largest stablecoin by market capitalization for customers in the region. “Crypto.com has delisted USDT for users in Canada in accordance with instructions from the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) as part of our pre-registration undertaking for a restricted dealer license,” a spokesperson for Crypto.com told Decrypt. Canadian users of the exchange were notified about th...
Nov 15, 2022
Business
Circle Reveals FTX Exposure, Says USDC Conversions on Binance Have Hurt Projections
The collapse of FTX and automatic conversions of USD Coin on Binance will cause Circle’s performance to be “materially lower” than the projections it made in February, the company said in a new regulatory filing. In it, Circle disclosed that the “tiny” FTX equity that Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire alluded to on Twitter last week is a $10.6 million investment the company made in the FTX Group, according to new regulatory filings. Relatively speaking, the $10.6 million probably is small for Circle....
Oct 24, 2022
Coins
MakerDAO Votes to Custody $1.6 Billion in USDC With Coinbase
Coinbase will custody $1.6 billion worth of MarkerDAO’s USD Coin (USDC) treasury with its institutional-grade service, allowing the DAO to earn up to 1.5% rewards on the funds. The proposal was ratified with 75% of the votes in favor on Monday afternoon after Coinbase Institutional submitted it on September 6. The USDC represents one-third of the treasury backing the Peg Stability Module, which allows users to deposit collateral in exchange for DAI, Maker’s U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin. Maker w...
Oct 10, 2022
Coins
Circle’s USDC Stablecoin Has Lost All Its Post-Terra Gains
After a 7-week rally in May and June that sent USD Coin’s market capitalization above $56 billion, an all-time high, Circle’s stablecoin has now lost all the ground it gained earlier this year. On Monday, USDC had a market cap of $46 billion—the lowest it’s been since January of this year. USDC was recently dealt a blow from an effort to “enhance liquidity and capital-efficiency” at Binance. At the start of September, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume said that it would begin autom...
Sep 28, 2022
Business
Stablecoin Markets Shift as Binance Begins USDC Conversions
Binance conversions of Circle's USDC, Paxos's Pax Dollar, and TrueUSD to the exchange’s own stablecoin, Binance USD, have begun. And the effects on the stablecoin market are already being felt. Since Binance's announcement that it would discontinue support for competing stablecoins on its exchange, the world's largest by volume, USDC outflows from Binance—that is, the number of USDC stablecoins leaving the exchange—are up by 93%. Meanwhile, USDC's market cap has fallen by 5%. As of Wednesday af...
Sep 7, 2022
Coins
Tether’s Lead Over USDC Hits $16B as Binance Moves to Limit Stablecoin Competitors
For a while there, it looked like Circle’s USDC stablecoin was within range to overtake Tether, its biggest competitor. Starting in June and through the end of July, the gap between the two stablecoins’ market capitalizations hovered around $10 billion. While that’s still a pretty sizable lead, keep in mind that USDT and USDC started the year with $36 billion worth of daylight between them. But things have shifted dramatically since then. At the time of writing, USDT’s market cap is $68 billion...
Sep 6, 2022
Business
Russia Wants to Use Stablecoins to Get Around Western Sanctions
Russia is advancing its crypto strategy to circumvent Western sanctions. Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseyev today said the country is exploring stablecoins to make payments with “friendly countries,” according to Russian state news agency Tass. The country’s biggest news agency quoted Moiseyev saying that Russia is working to “create bilateral platforms” with “tokenized instruments” to avoid using U.S. dollars and euros. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to another asset, l...
Jun 21, 2022
Long Reads
As Tether Faces Billions in Redemptions, Circle's USDC Is Gaining Ground
During a Crypto Winter, investors tend to stash a portion of their bull market gains in stablecoins to wait out the downturn. But over the past two months—through Terra's UST stablecoin collapse, panic over a potential bank run at crypto lending company Celsius, and insolvency for crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital—that bearish behavior has played out very differently for the two largest stablecoins by market capitalization: Tether (USDT) and US Dollar Coin (USDC). While Tether’s market cap...
May 18, 2022
Coins
The Big 'Winner' From the Crypto Crash? USDC Stablecoin
When Terra and its UST stablecoin collapsed last week in tandem with a marketwide crypto crash, things looked very shaky for crypto in general and stablecoins in particular. But the crash produced at least one winner in terms of market cap and, potentially, reputation: USDC stablecoin. As UST was headed for zero and USDT (Tether) was processing billions in redemptions, USDC was padding its market cap. At the start of the crash on May 8, USD Coin had a market capitalization between $48 billion an...
May 11, 2022
Coins
Crypto Exchanges ‘Trading Against Their Customers,’ Says SEC Chair Gensler
Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler leveled sharp criticism at cryptocurrency exchanges and stablecoins during an interview on Tuesday. Gensler took issue with the fact that many of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges run custody, market-making, and trading services without keeping them separate the way traditional exchanges are required to. “Crypto’s got a lot of those challenges—of platforms trading ahead of their customers,” Gensler told Bloomberg. “In fact, they’re trading...
May 10, 2022
Coins
What Terra's Meltdown Means for Centralized Stablecoins Tether and USDC
As the market panics over the implications of Terra’s UST losing its dollar peg, questions have been raised about its asset-backed stablecoin competitors, Tether and USD Coin. Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC)—the two largest stablecoins by market cap, respectively—are backed by the U.S. dollar, meaning that the issuers of these coins ostensibly maintain reserves of cash or cash equivalents to back each coin that’s in circulation. The idea being that if an investor decided to redeem their USDT...
Mar 31, 2022
Business
USDC Reserves Will Be Custodied With BNY Mellon, Says Circle
Circle has selected Bank of New York Mellon as its primary custodian for USD Coin (USDC) reserves. In the past six months, Circle has seen its valuation double to $9 billion and the market cap of its USDC stablecoin increase 60% to $51 billion. “Building trust, stability and resilience in the digital asset economy is foundational to Circle’s mission,” said Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire. “As we continue to see exponential growth in USDC, the opportunity to work with BNY Mellon is one...
Jan 27, 2022
Investigations
‘Snow Job’: The Plot to Hand the Crypto Industry to the Big Banks
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” That adage has been attributed to everyone from Henry Kissinger to Kurt Cobain, but these days it would be a fitting motto for the crypto industry. In 2021, crypto believers became convinced that the U.S. government has it in for them. And not without reason: A series of decisions by the SEC and other regulators suggested that federal officials are not just indifferent to the industry, but actively hostile to it. The question is...