The cryptocurrency market is characterized by an important aspect that is being exploited by professional traders and, at the same time, is perhaps slowing down its mass adoption: volatility. This is a problem that many have tried to solve with stablecoins.
Libra is far from ready and, as confirmed by Zuckerberg, there is not yet a launch date so to date the two main stablecoins for market caps are Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC).
Tether (USDT) ranks fourth per market cap
Tether (USDT) is undoubtedly the most popular and used stablecoin.
Following the large collapse of Bitcoin, which suddenly dropped to around $8,000, Tether (USDT) has become the fourth most important cryptocurrency for market cap, amounting to $4.1 billion, behind only Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and XRP.
Tether is now the number one stablecoin. Proof of this is the daily trading volumes recorded by the currency pegged to the value of the dollar that has recently beaten the trading volumes even of Bitcoin (BTC).
One of the main reasons for this stablecoin being so popular is certainly due to the flexibility of the protocol used, which provides for the possibility of using USDT tokens on several blockchains, including that of Ethereum, Bitcoin (through Omni), Tron, Algorand and even EOS.
Not only that but recently the company has also integrated Tether on the Liquid Network protocol, a high-performance sidechain that allows you to transfer tokens anchored to BTC, at low cost and in a very short time.
Tether Limited and its exchange partner Bitfinex are facing a lawsuit as Bitfinex is accused of bringing more stablecoins to the market to fill a gap of $850 million.
USD Coin (USDC) turns one year old
Coinbase and Circle only a year ago introduced USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The main feature is the reputation of its two supporters, which is certainly a good starting point.
In 12 months USDC has made giant strides becoming the second-largest stablecoin in terms of market capitalisation ($421 million) and ranking 24th for market cap.
1 year ago, a small but relentlessly motivated squad of developers, designers and PMs at @Coinbase and @CirclePay launched USDC.
Today, it's the 2nd largest stablecoin in the world with over $1B issued. What a journey, and it's only the beginning! https://t.co/u3OSNptmsf pic.twitter.com/d5rYirr4bd
— Zach Segal 🛡 (@zosegal) September 27, 2019
The somewhat incredible growth of USDC is due to two key factors. The cause that Tether is facing with the NYAG has made this stablecoin lose credibility in the eyes of investors.
Second, the fact that USDC is supported by two industry leaders such as Coinbase and Circle can only increase investor confidence in this cryptocurrency.
USD Coin has recently decided to expand the number of applications that use it for its sales or financial services activities, thus becoming increasingly a digital representation of the dollar. Recently, the applications Nuo network, Deconet, Wanchain and Loom have added it to their payment solutions. To date, more than 100 projects and exchanges are implementing or introducing USD Coin internally as a means of payment.
Clearly USDC still has a long way to go if it wants to exceed USDT, which has volumes of about $23 billion dollars compared to $201 million of USDC.
