(Bloomberg) — Crypto’s second-largest stablecoin has returned to its target of $1 on the dollar.
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USD Coin, a major plank in the crypto markets, was trading at 98.2 cents, up $1 as of 10:50 a.m. in Tokyo on Sunday. The coin had earlier fetched less than 85 cents a tepec, sending tremors through digital assets.
Circle reiterated that its stablecoin, also known as USDC, is fully backed by $42.1 billion in cash and US Treasuries. The $3.3 billion in outbound transactions initiated Thursday at the Silicon Valley bank has not yet been resolved but the firm said it expressed confidence in U.S. regulatory efforts to manage the overall situation.
“SVB may not recover 100% and any returns may take some time,” the circular said, adding that the company “will stand behind the USDC as required by law under the Stored Value Transfer Regulation and cover any shortfall using corporate resources, including external capital if necessary.”
Considered one of the safest assets in crypto with a stable $1 value, USDC’s volatility spilled over to other stablecoins like Dai and Pax Dollar, but they were pushed closer to their pegs. Top stablecoin Tether, or USDT — which has previously faced scrutiny over its holdings — said on Friday it had no exposure to Silicon Valley Bank and was committed to $1 or more.
“There’s a two-way flow in wanting some frenzy and out of the USDC,” said Spencer Halarn, a derivatives trader at investment firm GSR. Some investors moved to Tether as a “temporary shelter,” he said, while traders were “doing the math on potential downside and value buying.”
Competition for deposits
On Friday, Silicon Valley Bank became the largest US lender to fail in more than a decade. Deposits up to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s insured limit of $250,000 will be available Monday.
Regulators are racing to sell assets and make a portion of customers’ uninsured deposits available as quickly as possible – with the initial fee range of 30% to 50% or more being disclosed behind the scenes.
In earlier tweets, Circle’s chief strategy officer Dante Disparte described the collapse of the Silicon Valley bank as a “black swan failure” in the U.S. financial system, saying that without a federal rescue plan “there will be broad implications for business, banking and entrepreneurs.”
Stablecoins must hold a set value against another, more liquid asset, such as the US dollar. Some, like the circle, are backed by cash and securities holdings. Investors often park funds in stablecoins between crypto trades or when accessing blockchain-based financial services.
‘Things will get better’
USDC has about 41 billion tokens in circulation, with a market cap of about $40 billion, CoinGecko data shows. Billions of dollars worth of tokens have been redeemed by traders since Friday.
US-based crypto exchange Coinbase Global Inc. It said it would “temporarily suspend” the exchange of USDC into US dollars over the weekend, and resume Monday when banks open.
“The USDC situation will improve,” wrote Noel Acheson, editor of the “Crypto Is Macro Now” newsletter. “Monday should bring news of the settlement to SVB depositors, and in the short term the circle will be able to recover at least some funds, while the rest can get convertible notes.”
The swing in USDC had a knock-on effect on decentralized finance, or DeFi – applications that allow users to trade, borrow and borrow money and rely heavily on trading pairs associated with the stablecoin. On Saturday, members of the DeFi community that runs DAI proposed changes to the mechanism to help keep its stablecoin at $1 to reduce exposure to the USDC.
Challenges of Crypto
The crypto industry continues to retreat from a sustained trajectory, knocking $2 trillion off the value of digital assets since November 2021, fueling a series of explosions like the algorithmic TerrauSD stablecoin, the Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and the FTX exchange.
The TerraUSD token – known as UST – has attempted to use a combination of algorithms and trader incentives involving its sister token, Luna, to maintain its value. That system’s $60 billion sweep intensified regulatory scrutiny of stablecoins.
“The market ‘panic priced’ USDC as USDT priced around the Luna collapse,” said Haohan Xu, chief executive of Apifiny, an institutional trading platform.
Broader digital-asset markets are reeling from a week of losses. Bitcoin is down about 9% in the period, the most since a 23% weekly decline in November amid the decline of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX platform.
For crypto market prices: CRYP; For top crypto news: TOP Crypto.
–With assistance from Swashri Ghosh, Olga Kareef, David Pan, and Shiin Chen.
(Updates with USDC’s partial recovery from the first paragraph.)
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