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As the world’s biggest cryptocurrency by market cap struggles to recover after last week’s crypto bloodbath, regulatory and industry focus has turned to stablecoins, which have stayed safe thanks to their fiat pegs, Reuters reported.
Notable stablecoin milestones
Over the past week, Meta piloted a stablecoin payments wallet and Visa introduced a crypto advisory service, stating that stablecoins and not cryptocurrencies could become the medium of exchange.
Regulatory response
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stressed the need to regulate stablecoins. For their part, top executives from Coinbase, circle, and other leading cryptocurrency companies urged Congress to make the rules for the industry clearer. Last week, Japan’s financial regulator announced it would make rules to restrict the issuance of stablecoins to banks and payment processors in 2022.
France and Switzerland’s national banks announced the first cross-border trial of central bank digital currency (CBDC) payments in Europe was successful. They ran tests on project Jura, named after the mountains dividing the two countries.
Stablecoin market cap gained $21B in a month
According to data of Delphi Digital, the top five stablecoins’ market cap has gained $21 billion just this past month; from $129 billion to almost $150 billion. Tether has the biggest market cap of all stablecoins, totaling $76 billion.
For most of last week, Bitcoin (BTC/USD) was unable to break $50,000. Since the crash 11 days ago, the total crypto market cap has stood at $2.25 trillion, down from $2.6 trillion at the beginning of this month.
Fed tightening effect on crypto unclear
It’s hard to say what will happen as the Federal Reserve prepares to increase rates or accelerates monetary tightening according to Chris Weston of Pepperstone brokerage in Melbourne. Weston told Reuters:
I feel like there would be headwinds, but as always with crypto the only thing you can have is an open mind.
Active BTC addresses reach 1M after crash
After the crash, the number of active Bitcoin addresses peaked at one million, data from Arcane Research shows. This is the highest number since Bitcoin’s 35% plunge in May. MicroStrategy Inc bought another 1,434 bitcoins in the dip, bringing the total value of its holdings to about $82.4 million.
However, the number of wallets holding more than 1,000 BTC was lower the past week, which may indicate profit taking among whale investors according to Kraken Digital.
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