Crypto
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO, Ripple
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple (Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images)

Stablecoins are having a moment, but is there room for Ripple’s new RLUSD coin?

Dethroning longtime players is a long shot.

The crowded stablecoin space is getting busier with Ripple’s recent approval from the New York State Department of Finance for RLUSD, a dollar-pegged token set to be listed on exchanges “soon.” The timing of the coin’s debut makes sense: stablecoins are gaining more mainstream attention, Ripple is on a victory lap, and its XRP token has been on a tear, rising nearly 300% this year. And of course, the crypto regulatory environment is on course to become clearer (and friendlier) with the new administration.

Stablecoins are a type of crypto pegged to an asset, generally fiat currency like the dollar, though they can also be pegged to a commodity like gold. They aim to minimize volatility and, well, be “stable.”

While there’s an increasing appetite for stablecoins and enormous enthusiasm for RLUSD, the competition is fierce. Many players want to be part of the rapidly growing space, and whether a challenger can carve out a significant market share for itself remains to be seen.

Numbers speak for themselves: the stablecoin market crossed $200 billion for the first time on December 11, CoinDesk reported. BitWise predicts that “stablecoin assets will double to $400 billion as the US passes long-awaited stablecoin legislation.”

Sure, RLUSD has room to grow, but some established players, like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, have been dominating the space, and several newcomers seem to be having trouble finding their footing.

“RLUSD can become unique in the market and find its place, mainly if Ripple focuses on developing its global partnerships and the use cases for cross-border payments,” Patrick Gruhn, former head of the now defunct FTX Europe and founder of Perpetuals.com, told Sherwood News. He added, however, that entering a market led by Tether and Circle is complex and requires a clear differentiator regarding features, legal aspects, and use. 

“The success of RLUSD will depend on it providing better features such as lower charges, faster clearance, or better compliance,” Gruhn said. 

With a $140.5 billion market cap, USDT is the largest stablecoin, followed by USDC, which has a $41.6 billion market cap, per CoinGecko

Another one to watch is Ethena’s USDe, which CryptoRank reported became the third-largest stablecoin by supply on December 9.

Meanwhile, PayPal’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, PYUSD, initially had a meteoric rise when it launched last year, but is now lagging far behind the pack with just a $494 million market cap.

“PYUSD’s uphill battle against incumbents is yet more evidence that those like Ripple will also find the competition to be rather stiff,” said Brian D. Evans, CEO and founder of BDE Ventures, a venture firm focusing on digital assets and artificial intelligence.

While USDT and USDC’s dominance could shift, dethroning them would require time and effort. As Token Terminal said, USDT, with a 70% market share, is “one of the most battle-tested stablecoins in the market, having met redemptions of over 10% of its reserves in the week following the Terra/Luna collapse.”

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider, among others.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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