Select Stablecoin Market Caps Decline As Binance Auto-Converts To BUSD

🌅 Welcome!

A trillion-dollar financial services company is launching an Ethereum fund and a bankrupt crypto fund’s multi-million dollar NFT portfolio is repossessed by liquidators. Elsewhere, Twitter confirms a buyout by Elon Musk as DOGE pumps on the news. Just another sign of a rational, healthy, and fully functional market.

Market caps of select stablecoins are trending down, and our Media team takes a look at how regulators are responding to the censorship-resistant nature of Ethereum.

This is the Delphi Daily. Let’s dive in.

🚨 In Case You Missed It

NFTs owned by the bankrupt crypto fund, Three Arrows Capital were transferred to a Gnosis Safe wallet as liquidators explore an eventual sale.
Etherscan will stop supporting Ropsten and Rinkeby testnets. The Ethereum Foundation also plans to move over to Goerli and Sepolia testnets.
Fidelity launches a new fund to invest in ETH. The fund has already raised $5m from accredited investors.
The EU finalizes the full legal text of its landmark crypto legislation that introduces licenses for wallets and exchanges.

📊 Select Stablecoin Market Caps Fall As Binance Moves To BUSD

Since the start of September, the market cap of USDC is down -11%, USDP is down -5%, and TUSD is down -17%. On the other hand, the market cap of BUSD is up 10% during the same period.
This divergence in the total supply of these stablecoins can be attributed to a move announced by Binance on Sept 5th. The exchange stated that it will auto-convert any USDC, USDP, and TUSD balances held by users to BUSD.
Additionally, the exchange announced that it will delist spot trading pairs associated with these stablecoins and stop accepting them as margin assets for futures.
Users can still deposit or withdraw these stablecoins, but they will be converted to BUSD for use on the exchange.
While combining different stablecoins into one enhances liquidity and capital efficiency for traders, it also helps Binance increase the usage of its native BUSD stablecoin over others.
The market cap of USDT, a major stablecoin that was not included in the announcement, remains unaffected during this period.

📺 Ethereum: The Big Red Line

Ethereum is currently facing its largest battle test yet. In August, the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash and arrested its creator Alexey Pertsev.
This caused Flashbots, Ethereum’s largest block builder, and other decentralized applications (dApps) to start censoring transactions on Ethereum, a supposedly permissionless network.
How much power do the U.S. regulators have over Ethereum? Is Ethereum and its dApps truly decentralized? And will Ethereum survive?
Show Notes
- 00:00:00 – Opening
- 00:00:34 – What makes Ethereum special?
- 00:02:36 – U.S. Regulators move against crypto.
- 00:04:10 – Tornado Cash sanctions & Alexey Pertsev’s arrest.
- 00:06:40 – Censorship by decentralized applications.
- 00:07:54 – Crypto fights back.
- 00:08:40 – Ethereum validator censorship scenarios.
- 00:11:27 – Consequences of U.S. regulations.
- 00:14:07 – The future of Ethereum.
Social links:
Resources:
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ethereum
- The Complete Guide to Rollups

🐣 Notable Tweets

Introducing Rovers by Mars Protocol

1/ Mars v2 introduces a radical new DeFi primitive to Cosmos: Rovers

Engineered to operate in the cosmos’ harshest environments, rovers aim to give their pilots DeFi superpowers to navigate new, uncharted worlds. Here’s how…

🧵🔻

— Mars Protocol (@mars_protocol) Oct 4, 2022

How Does Ribbon Earn 25%+ APY on USDC?

Seen a bit of confusion surrounding the @ribbonfinance R-Earn $USDC vault mechanics…

Can you really earn 25%+ APY on vanilla $USDC deposits w.o liq mining rewards?

How is this sustainable?

Let’s take a dive into the strategy specifics 🧵👇

— Barry Fried 🦇🔊 (@BarryFried1) Oct 4, 2022