Riding The Wave News Summary #41
What Terra's Meltdown Means for Centralized Stablecoins Tether and USDC, Treasury’s Yellen Highlights Terra Collapse in Call for Stablecoin Legislation, & more
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Table of Contents
Tweets
What Terra's Meltdown Means for Centralized Stablecoins Tether and USDC
Treasury’s Yellen Highlights Terra Collapse in Call for Stablecoin Legislation
El Salvador buys the bitcoin dip, adding 500 coins to its balance sheet
Bitcoin Miners About to Be Hit With Record Difficulty as Profitability Drops
Bitcoin network transactions and fees surge amid investor de-risking
Tweets
Full Interview:
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 or USDC, they would get exactly $1 back for every token that the stablecoin issuer sold.
“Tether holders should feel very secure that Tether will hold its peg since it is dollar backed and market forces do not affect it,” Collins told Decrypt in an email. “I wouldn't be surprised to see an increase in holders of algorithmic stablecoins start to move their money into asset backed coins like Tether."
“Since these coins are fiat collatorialized, there is less risk of dramatic fluctuations in the value of their currency reserves—provided they actually have 1:1 backing,” Xu told Decrypt in an email.
“I don't see any immediate risk to Tether and USDC (from the UST collapse) as they have a very different modus operandi,” he told Decrypt in an email. “In fact, UST has been keeping its peg partly because of USDT and USDC (and their deep liquidity), via UST's peg to the Curve 3pool.”
I’m not too worried about other stable coins as Terra was being extremely aggressive with their Bitcoin position which left them overextended and has caused them pain in the short term. In the long term, they could recover but with the 99% drop in value, it will be challenging to accomplish. I do expect it to recover to some extent assuming the project owners continue with it and don’t abandon it, especially with the large amount of Bitcoin they hold.
Treasury’s Yellen Highlights Terra Collapse in Call for Stablecoin Legislation
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen today said that stablecoins need to be regulated by this year. In a hearing Tuesday, Secretary Yellen said that although digital assets may “promote innovation,” they could also “present risks to the financial system.”
The Treasury Secretary used the example of Terra, a blockchain which has a native stablecoin, UST. Yesterday, the stablecoin slipped below its dollar peg to $0.65.
Terra’s troubles happened because, unlike other big stablecoins (such as Tether and USDC, which are ahead of UST in terms of market cap), UST is not backed by a fiat currency in a bank or some equivalent.
Secretary Yellen today said: “A stablecoin known as TerraUSD experienced a run and declined in value. I think that this simply illustrates that this is a rapidly growing product and there are rapidly growing risks.”
Unfortunately, the government will likely use this situation against all stablecoins when no others are in the same situation but on the bright side, we may see regulation come into place at last.
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