It’s All About Crypto Blog
The Unthinkable Happened: USDT Supply Is Declining
The total supply of Tether tokens has been shrinking for the second month in a row. For me, that comes as a real surprise. Year after year, I got used to seeing the supply grow and grow. It felt like every other day there was another headline about Tether minting yet another billion. For the supply to decline, it is not enough to simply pause new issuance...
Crypto Didn’t Take the Money - Coinbase Did
KlariVis, a banking analytics platform, has released a study claiming that U.S. banks are losing deposits due to money being transferred to the Coinbase exchange. According to the study, $78.3 million was moved from deposits across 53 banks to Coinbase over the past year. Several cryptocurrency media reported this. And, at first glance, it looks like cryptocurrencies are gradually replacing...
Coinbase Walks Away - OP Pays the Price
The OP token has dropped nearly 25% in just 24 hours - all because Coinbase announced it would no longer use the Optimism Superchain for its Base network. What does such a sharp move actually mean? One of two things: * either this is an irrational panic sell-off, * or the market had been pricing in the idea that OP would...
The Return of Crypto Payments in Belarus - On the Bank’s Terms
In Belarus, the Deputy Governor of the National Bank has announced that in the near future, self-employed individuals - meaning entrepreneurs and freelancers - will be allowed to receive payment for their services in cryptocurrency. At first glance, it sounds progressive. Even more ambitious than El Salvador, where similar rules apply only to Bitcoin, not to other cryptocurrencies...
Stablecoins Replace Banks? Vietnam Is Already There
A week ago, I published an article about who will unseat Bitcoin from the top spot. Among other things, I argued that in the foreseeable future, stablecoins could replace banks for everyday users. It turns out that in Vietnam, that future has already arrived. Wello has launched a platform that lets people pay for everyday purchases not just with stablecoins, but directly...
Blockchain Privacy, But Not for Everyone
The Stellar team has officially unveiled a new privacy solution for transactions, developed by engineers at Nethermind. It enables asset transfers on the Stellar network while concealing the details of the payment from outside observers. Block explorers will show that a transaction took place, but they won’t reveal who the actual sender was or who ultimately received the...
Can TON Pay Turn Telegram into a Crypto Service?
This is a story about how Apple has been keeping cryptocurrencies at arm’s length for more than a decade - and why TON Foundation’s new initiative is unlikely to change that overnight. Screenshot of a 2014 petition demanding the return of Bitcoin wallets to the iPhone This week, TON Foundation announced the launch of a new software platform for...
Did FTX Accidentally Do Investors a Favor?
Today, the FTX bankruptcy estate recorded another batch of approved customer claims. As you may know, FTX clients are being repaid in U.S. dollars, based on the market prices of their crypto holdings at the time the company filed for bankruptcy in November 2022. And that gave me a slightly crazy idea: what if keeping crypto on FTX actually turned out to...
Crypto Is Not a Business Model
According to Coinrank, the largest companies that were publicly and demonstratively buying up crypto throughout last year are now sitting on unrealized losses - regardless of which cryptocurrency they chose. The only difference is the size of the loss in percentage terms. I think these numbers are important for everyone to see. Several times last year I wrote that if...
Bitcoin Privacy: What Is Actually Missing?
Barry Silbert has said that 5–10% of capital currently held in Bitcoin could flow into privacy-focused cryptocurrencies over the next few years. Statements like this always leave me puzzled. They seem to imply that Bitcoin has unresolved privacy issues. It is not true. Bitcoin does not suffer from some inherent, unfixable privacy flaw. People who work closely with Bitcoin...
