The Bank of Canada is pushing ahead with digitizing its currency. In a speech today, BoC deputy governor Timothy Lane noted that the COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated the need to digitize cash. Lane said: "The pandemic may bring us to a decision point sooner than we had anticipated." Lane was, however, careful to specify that "a digital currency is by no means a foregone conclusion." In October, Lane that said central banks should stand by with digital tokens in the event that Libra, now Diem fell to regulators. Today, he noted that central banks may be more trustworthy than private …

LUNA, the native coin of the Terra blockchain, shot up another 37% to $2.46 on heavy trading volumes today, continuing a parabolic climb that started in mid-November. The coin is currently up 100% in price since news broke one week ago that Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital made a $25 million investment in Terraform Labs, the Seoul-based company that manages development of Terra. Terra is an ambitious stablecoin project from Korea working to combine the stability of fiat currency with the non-censorable nature of cryptocurrency. Terra-based mobile payments DApp CHAI is also growing in popularity. It cuts down on fiat payment …

The sands are shifting in the stablecoin ecosystem, with Circle’s USD Coin quickly eating into the dominance of the sector’s leader, Tether. According to a Feb. 1 report from Glassnode, the amount of USDC on exchanges increased by more than 112% in January alone, growing from $431 million to over $915 million. Since the beginning of the year, roughly $1 billion worth of new USDC has been minted — of which more than 90% has been sent to centralized exchanges. With nearly half a billion worth of USDC making its way onto exchanges in a single month, Glassnode speculates that …

During the Visa Q1 earnings call on Thursday, chairman and CEO Al Kelly devoted a portion of his comments to reaffirming the financial giant’s commitment to crypto payments and onramps, as well as explaining “how Visa thinks about crypto in general and our approach.” The financial services firm with over $72 billion in assets as of 2019 has been aggressively pursing crypto payments as of late, including by way of partnerships enabling crypto debit cards, and investing Zap, a crypto payments startup. Additionally, earlier this month Visa was forced to abandon a $5.3 billion acquisition of payments platform Plaid on …

Amid renewed bullish action on cryptocurrency markets, stablecoins like Tether (USDT) are flooding exchanges to hit a new historical high in terms of allocation. According to market data provider CryptoQuant, stablecoin holdings on global crypto exchanges broke a new all-time high on Jan. 28, surpassing $4.7 billion. This amount makes up a significant part of the total stablecoin market capitalization, which is estimated at around $35.2 billion at the time of writing, according to data from CoinGecko. The total trading volume of all stablecoins is now evaluated at around $111 billion, with Tether (USDT) alone making up $103 billion of …

Circle, the company behind the second most popular stablecoin USD Coin, has rolled out a new API that will allow for the seamless transfer of USDC to USD via automated clearinghouse (ACH) systems. The first exchange to adopt the new API will be derivatives and futures specialist FTX, looking to speed up USD settlement processes on behalf of their customers. In a blog entry, project manager Gee Chuang described how Circle’s ACH API improves connections between the fiat world and the digital world by introducing interoperability among payment rails, such as card, wire and blockchain transfers. Using the API, USD …

A new report by CoinShares suggests Bitcoin (BTC) has garnered 97% of the total crypto inflows in 2021. The recent correction in Bitcoin price does not seem to have deterred crypto investors as CoinShares data shows a record $1.3 billion in crypto product inflows over the past week. This suggests that investors are accumulating on the dips rather than attempting to chase higher prices. Another space that has taken giant strides in the past few months has been the decentralized finance sector. While bond yields across the world are reeling near-zero levels, the attractive yield farming opportunities in DeFi and …

Sometimes, “stablecoins” and variants such as “algorithmic stablecoins” function like historical names, as they refer to projects that call themselves stablecoins, such as Basis Cash, Elastic Set Dollar, Frax and their clones. The word "stablecoin" can be used as a logical description for “a cryptocurrency designed to have low price volatility” and has “stores of value or units of account,” or “a new type of cryptocurrency that often have their value pegged to another asset… designed to tackle the inherent volatility seen in cryptocurrency prices,” or a currency that can “act as a medium of monetary exchange and a mode …

During the second half of 2020, we saw a growing interest in cryptocurrencies from institutional investors and big capital. However, all the attention of the whales, as well as all the attention of the public, was fixed on Bitcoin (BTC). Today, we will look at why Ether (ETH) is a more attractive asset and why this cryptocurrency should become the “first cryptocurrency” for every investor. Let's start with the numbers: ETH’s growth since its March 2020 low after the coronavirus-induced market crash has been 1,200%, whereas BTC has only grown around 700%. ETH’s growth since its March 2020 low after …

Editor's note It may be too late for resolutions and too early for Lent, but lacking any discrete occasion, I would still like to give up United States political news for a while, or at least for the duration of one Law Decoded. Fortunately, in the spirit of going international and leaving the bonkers election cycle of the U.S., blockchain technology and stablecoins are playing a major role in the latest developments in cross-border payments and settlements. It’s long been one of the most talked-about applications of blockchain technology. Diplomatic scheming shows up in payments by regular folks in the …

A coalition of DSD whales has bought out the biggest bear entity on the project allegedly responsible for consistently keeping the token price below the $1 peg. Posting on the DSD discord group, the bear in question “Escobar.eth” revealed, “I’ve executed an OTC deal officially and sold out 5.5m DSD to a whale group. I will not be impeding further expansion efforts.” One of the facilitators of the deal and a multisig holder on the project, who goes by @_wilske on Twitter, told Cointelegraph: “Escobar has been suppressing price for a while now, can't speak for his intentions but I …

Sberbank, the largest state-owned bank in Russia, has reportedly filed an application with the Bank of Russia to launch a blockchain platform for its “Sbercoin” stablecoin. Sergey Popov, director of the transaction business at Sberbank, announced the news on Jan. 21 at a local financial event Russian news agency Interfax reports. At “Digital transformation and prospects for regulating the digital economy,” Popov said that Sberbank applied with the central bank in early January, explaining that the registration procedure usually takes no longer than 45 days. As such, the bank may launch its platform and stablecoin by the spring this year, …