Crypto Shenanigans: Stablecoins Steal the Show! 💰🎩

Well, I reckon it was a downright dismal week for the crypto folks, with BTC and ETH taking a tumble like a cat in a bathtub. The CoinDesk 20, which covers a hefty 80% of the market, lost a staggering 7% since Monday. Ain’t that a kick in the pants?

But hold your horses! While the speculative assets were playing hide and seek, the stablecoins were strutting their stuff like a rooster in a henhouse.

In a twist that would make a snake oil salesman proud, the U.S. House decided to introduce a stablecoin bill, following the Senate’s lead like a puppy chasing its tail. Jesse Hamilton reported this little nugget. And wouldn’t you know it, Wyoming, that cheeky “Blockchain State,” is itching to have its own stablecoin, testing the waters on Avalanche, Solana, and Ethereum, as Kris Sandor reported.

Now, let’s not forget World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the financial protocol that’s got Donald Trump and his family backing it like a dog on a bone. They confirmed the launch of their stablecoin (USD1) this week, and Don Trump Jr. was hollering about it at the DC Blockchain Summit like a proud peacock.

Meanwhile, Fidelity Investment, that old TradFi innovator, is in the thick of launching its own stablecoin, part of a grand plan to wade into the tokenized bond market, as Jamie Crawley reported.

Circle, the issuer of the second biggest stablecoin (USDC), finally got the green light to operate in Japan, teaming up with local heavyweight SBI Holdings, as Sam Reynolds reported. Talk about a match made in crypto heaven!

Over in Europe, Ian Allison had a scoop about Sam Altman’s World Network chatting with Visa about linking on-chain card features to a self-custody crypto wallet. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it?

Will Canny got wind that Sam Hill, Zodia Custody’s COO, decided to skedaddle back to TradFi. He managed to get the Standard Chartered-backed company to confirm the move, and we beat the competition to the punch.

Canny followed up the next day with a story that no one else had the gumption to report: a wave of senior staff losses at crypto prime broker FalconX. Meanwhile, BlackRock was busy adding talent to its digital assets team in the U.S. — talk about a tale of two cities!

We kept our eyes on Strategy (MicroStrategy), the pioneer of the corporate bitcoin treasury. Christine Lee had a two-hour chinwag with executive chairman Michael Saylor, who mused about bitcoin being a $200 trillion asset and promised to burn bitcoin in the name of immortality. Now that’s a tall tale if I ever heard one!

Strategy has poured about $33 billion into bitcoin so far through various stock offerings, both common and preferred. James Van Straten explained the differences between the company’s fund-raising instruments for bitcoin purchases. Tom Carreras followed up later with a delightful piece showing how MSTR stockholders might be at risk from Saylor’s buy-every-bitcoin strategy.

Meanwhile, the SEC continued to drop enforcement actions against crypto companies (Immutable was the latest, as Cheyenne Ligon reported). But, curiously, one involving Unicoin stayed open, much to the CEO’s chagrin.

It almost felt like a normal sort of week — more incremental than monumental. But then the president’s own media company announced that it was launching its own ETFs and ETPs with Crypto.com. Thank the stars above, crypto still has the power to surprise!

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2025-03-28 20:03