A Frozen Stablecoin Just Pumped 50x

So I was browsing CoinGecko's Top Gainers today, and there it was: the number one spot, a token up 5,019.5% in the past 24 hours. Have you ever seen anything like that? While the entire market is bleeding, one asset goes up 50x in a single day. How is that even possible?!

But the really interesting part is which asset pulled this off.

USDR.

A stablecoin.

Apparently, that's what you could have made dozens of x's on today.

The source of those gains, which someone may have pocketed, is information asymmetry. USDR is the very same stablecoin I covered in a deep-dive article a couple of weeks ago, after it was hacked.

After the hack, trading in USDR essentially dried up. Anyone willing to take it off your hands would only do so at a price close to zero. Then the issuer froze all tokens entirely, making them impossible to move at all.

And then, apparently, something happened today. I can't find any news about USDR, but insiders probably already know something. The result is right there in the CoinGecko screenshot.

In the US, a price spike like this would almost certainly trigger an investigation and potential criminal charges for insider trading. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out for a European stablecoin - one built specifically for full compliance with MiCA's strict requirements, which are supposed to protect holders from exactly this kind of situation.