#268—Stablecoins hold more T-bills than Germany

Also, it’s notlooking good for Binance

Oct 02, 2023

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This week:

Chart of the week
On trend: Tokenized T-bills
WSJ: Binance is melting down
Your weekly FTX fix: Sam’s mom
On trend: Stablecoins
Stuff happens

1. Chart of the week

Stablecoins hold more U.S. Treasuries than Germany:

2. On trend: Tokenized T-bills

Here’s Steakhouse Financial co-founder speaking to Axios (formerly of MakerDAO):

"DAO treasuries are key to unlock some new DeFi primitives. This year I think tokenized T-bills are the clear primitive to unlock," Derivaux told Axios in an interview during the Real-World Asset Summit in Brooklyn last week.

Relevant:

U.S. Treasury tasks JPMorgan with account validation for federal agencies

3. What people are reading: Binance is melting down

Here’s the WSJ:

What happens to Binance will have immense implications for the crypto industry because the exchange is so big. Industry players and watchers say other exchanges would fill the void if Binance were to collapse. But in the short term, liquidity in the market could evaporate, driving the price of tokens sharply down.
One institutional trader told The Wall Street Journal that his company has conducted fire drills to withdraw its assets from Binance quickly in the event of a meltdown.
Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, vowed to overcome the troubles in a message to Binance staff last month.
“Every battle is a do-or-die situation, and the only thing that can defeat us is ourselves,” she wrote in the message viewed by the Journal. “We have won countless times, and we need to win this time as well.”

Relevant:

4. Your weekly FTX fix

Sam’s mom—the New Yorker::

Fried is a leading scholar of legal ethics. Her best-known book, “The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire,” is a study of capitalism and the coercive aspects of free markets. “She’s a brilliant critic,” Debra Satz, the dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, said, “and the book really picks apart these debates about freedom and equality.” This year, her intellectual rigor has been applied to her son’s media strategy, which she considered integral to his defense—so integral that she and her husband hired a high-powered P.R. consultant, Risa Heller, to assist them. The couple embarked on a campaign to spread their perspective: that the press, unfairly assuming that their son is guilty, has failed to examine weaknesses in the government’s case and the role of FTX’s lawyers in the company’s downfall. The campaign was not aided by the September lawsuit against them—a legal action that their attorneys say is a cynical effort by John Ray to influence the outcome of their son’s trial. Calling the suit a waste of creditors’ money, Fried said that its real agenda was “to enflame the jury pool on the eve of Sam’s trial by portraying all of us as a pack of thieves.”
Robert Gordon, a Stanford Law School colleague, described Fried as one of the most “ethically fastidious” people he knows. “She seems so sure,” he said of her faith in her son, “and the way that she thinks through ethical problems is just so careful. This, of course, is the big mystery at the heart of all this.”
During a hike in the foothills of the mountains near the family’s home, Fried described herself to me as “emotionally reserved, like Sam,” shortly before she teared up. “I don’t care what is said about me, Joe doesn’t care what is said about him,” she said. “Saving Sam is the major project of our lives.” She had lost ten pounds since his legal troubles began, and a recent eye operation had temporarily affected her vision, but she seemed intent on projecting her resolve. Wearing a baseball cap and a bright-red backpack, Fried charged up a hillside, shoes crunching on the dirt. In two hours in the blazing sun, she didn’t take a sip of water.

5. On trend: Stablecoins

Here’s Tearsheet:

Visa recently announced that it will be partnering up with Solana to fuel its stablecoin ambitions. Due to the partnership, Visa will now be able to introduce USDC settlements over Solana’s network, which will increase the speed of cross-border settlement and introduce a new option for its clients that want to send or receive funds from Visa’s treasury system.
The payments company has been testing stablecoins since 2021 in its treasury operations with an eye towards reducing the costs of currency conversions in cross-border payments. To explain its decision to work with Solana as its blockchain technology of choice, the company’s recent deep dive says that Solana “holds promise for payments due to its speed, scalability and low transaction costs, helping to make it a good candidate for efficient blockchain settlement rails using stablecoins like USDC.”
…
Visa isn't the only payments company eyeing the potential of blockchain technology. In June, Mastercard partnered with a stablecoin digital wallet provider Stables to launch a virtual prepaid card in Australia that will allow users to pay with their stablecoin balance anywhere Mastercard is accepted.
Similarly, PayPal announced that Venmo users will now be able to buy the company’s stablecoin PYUSD which is pegged to the US dollar and runs on the Ethereum network. According to PayPal, users will be able to send stablecoins to each other without any cost.

Relevant:

Yaka Stuff

#268—Stablecoins hold more T-bills than Germany

Also, it’s notlooking good for Binance

1. Chart of the week

2. On trend: Tokenized T-bills

3. What people are reading: Binance is melting down

4. Your weekly FTX fix

5. On trend: Stablecoins

6. Stuff happens

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