gm — though it is not a very good morning for the markets. The coins are deeply in the red after the double whammy collapses of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank this week. Most of all, focus has turned to USDC and other stablecoins that have lost their dollar pegs after USDC issuer Circle disclosed that $3.3 billion of the cash backing USDC is sitting in Silicon Valley Bank. USDC sank to 87 cents late on Friday night before rebounding to 92 cents this morning. Still far below the $1 mark… we’ll keep watching and covering it for you all weekend at Decrypt.
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Just a couple months ago, the idea of NFTs minted on Bitcoin seemed like a pipe dream. Now theyâre booming, and the same technology has been tweaked to let people mint their own meme tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This week, pseudonymous Web3 builder Domo used the Ordinals protocolâwhich has enabled NFT-like media âinscriptionsâ on Bitcoinâto let users launch their own fungible tokens. The experimental process is called BRC-20 (like Ethereumâs ERC-20 tokens), and has already been used for âDogeâ and âPepeâ tokens, among others.
The discovery led to a surge in Ordinals inscriptions, which hit a new single-day peak above 31,000 on Thursday, but Domo cautions that the tokens are âworthlessâ and that it was merely meant as a fun experiment. Hmmmm.
đ° Coin of the Moment
Thereâs no winner this week amid the blood red market slump. Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down double-digit percentages over the past seven days. All of the other top 30 coins are in the red.
But the focus is all on USDC, which sank to 87 cents overnight and now, at the time of writing, is up to 92 cents. When TerraUSD failed last May, people said its failure showed the problem with algorithmic stablecoins, where the stablecoin is pegged to the price of another cryptocurrency. (Once LUNA went down, TerraUSD went with it.) The take was that stablecoins backed by actual cash in reserves are safe and swell. Now that narrative is also deflating; Circle had its money in real banks, and one of them just collapsed, so USDC has depegged. Will these events question the entire premise of stablecoins?
Dan Roberts and Stephen Graves returned from NFT Paris feeling super bullish after seeing tons of artists, builders, and luxury brands show upâand even Brigitte Macron. They recap the conference and play four interviews conducted there with Yat Siu (Animoca Brands Chairman), Sebastien Borget (The Sandbox COO), Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel (Arianee CEO), and Erika Wykes-Sneyd (Web3 lead at Adidas).
Anjali Young, the co-founder of Abridged and Collab.Land, talked to Decrypt’s Jason Nelson at ETH Denver about the origins of Collab.Land and says it erupted thanks to Covid, which created not just new interest in crypto but the need for better tools for DAO member collaboration.
