Tether maintains a liquidity cushion of nearly $3.3 billion to provide stability and trust in its ecosystem, with reserves totaling $86.1 billion, confirming a backing of over 100%.
Coinbase plans to list PayPal's stablecoin, PYUSD, signaling the convergence of traditional finance and the crypto economy and potentially challenging Tether's dominance in the stablecoin market.
Summary: Coinbase and Circle have dissolved the Centre Consortium due to regulatory clarity issues surrounding stablecoins, with Coinbase taking an equity stake in Circle and Circle assuming enhanced responsibilities for the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin; Binance.US partners with MoonPay to use Tether (USDT) as its new "base asset" for transactions, while Binance faces challenges with fiat withdrawals in Europe; Shopify now accepts USDC payments on its platform, and Solana Pay plans to add additional altcoins; China launches a blockchain-powered data exchange with over 300 participating enterprises.
Circle's USD Coin (USDC) has experienced a significant drop in market cap due to factors such as the depegging event earlier this year, rising interest rates, and differences in issuance models compared to Tether's USDT stablecoin, which recently reached a new high in market cap at $83 billion.
The largest stablecoin, USDT, has been depegging throughout August, leading to concerns about its stability and trustworthiness, with factors such as the redemption fee and minimum requirements being identified as potential contributors to the issue.
Stablecoin issuer Tether has become one of the top buyers of US Treasury bills, with an exposure of $72.5 billion, ranking above several countries, according to Tether's CTO Paolo Ardoino. This highlights the relevance of USDT in emerging markets as a protection against inflation.
Circle, the company behind the stablecoin USDC, faced a crisis when $3.3 billion of its reserves were stuck at Silicon Valley Bank, causing USDC to lose its $1 peg and lose market share to rival stablecoin Tether, revealing the challenges and shortcomings of Circle's ambitions to reshape the financial system with its dollar-backed token.
PayPal's stablecoin, PYUSD, has struggled to gain traction in the market, with a market capitalization of only $43.4 million compared to stablecoin leaders USD Coin and Tether, which have market capitalizations of $83 billion and $26 billion respectively, and trading volumes for PYUSD remain low.
Blockchain trackers have flagged a $1 billion authorization of Tether (USDT) in Tether's Treasury, which will be used to replenish the Tron network for issuance requests and chain swaps.
Stablecoin Tether has invested $420 million in German bitcoin miner Northern Data to gain a 20% stake and access to 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, aiming to become a major cloud GPU player in the AI industry.
Despite announcing its plans to eliminate secured loans, Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, has experienced a rise in such loans in 2023, with $5.5 billion of loans in its recent quarterly report, although it aims to reduce this to zero by 2024.
Tether, the firm behind stablecoin USDT, has made a strategic investment in crypto miner Northern Data Group in support of artificial intelligence initiatives and potential collaborations involving AI, P2P communications, and data storage solutions.