under five years, USD coin , the $38 billion blockchain-based digital dollar issued by Boston-based Circle Financial, has built itself into a leader in the $100 billion plus stablecoin market. Unlike larger rival Tether, Circle has been taking the high road, touting its transparency and regulatory bona fides to anyone who would listen.
“In stablecoins, we saw clients moving their assets from USDC, into BTC , and ETH ,” says Austin Reid of crypto prime broker FalconX. The panic also caused an inflow of billions to Tether, which briefly surged above a dollar. One reason Circle may have kept 8% of its reserves, largely uninsured, in a single California bank may have to do with the fact that few U.S. banks are willing to take on crypto companies as account holders. Silicon Valley was one such firm, though these types of firms probably represented less than 10% of its $175 billion deposit base.By professing transparency and regulatory compliance Circle’s USDC stablecoin became an institutional darling.
“I think we need legislation to provide clarity to digital assets on how they're categorized for that functional regulation,” says Representative French Hill , who chairs the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion. “However, I think it's more complicated than just the composition of what is the nature of the stable part of the stablecoin collateral.
Like the warning label on cigarettes, issuers would be forced to issue explicit statements saying that stablecoins were not backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. or protected by the FDIC.would ban the issuance of such tokens unless they were created by a subsidiary of an insured depository institution that has been approved to issue them or by a licensed non-bank entity.
The new legislation would also allow Federal Reserve banks to provide services to stablecoin issuers such as discount and borrowing privileges.