In a surprising moved, featured on Coindesk’s daily newsletter First Mover, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase acquired a minority stake in stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial. This step has led to the dissolution of their Centre Consortium venture, responsible for issuing USD Coin (USDC), the world’s second-largest stablecoin.
However, this doesn’t seem like a drawback, as Circle plans to continue the issuance and governance of USDC in-house. Remarkably, USDC is also making strides elsewhere with the inclusion of six more blockchains to its support network, taking the tally to 15. It’s worth noting that details regarding the size of the stake acquired by Coinbase remains undisclosed. Even more intriguing, no cash was involved in the transaction involving the stake, as per an anonymous source.
Meanwhile, the stage is set for a legal tussle as the U.S. Department of Justice and Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX founder, prepare for his October trial. The alleged charges against Bankman-Fried are severe and varied, including wire fraud, securities and commodities fraud conspiracy, and potential money laundering allegations. Currently, Bankman-Fried contests all charges.
Furthermore, on the lighter side of the crypto ecosystem, Social platform Friend.tech, a revolutionary concept that grants its users the ability to buy shares off people on other platforms like X (formerly Twitter) has surged significantly. Since its launch on August 10, the platform has reportedly reached more than 100,000 addresses. This precipitous growth correlates with the whopping revenues generated by the platform, surpassing the $25 million mark in fees according to DefiLlama. A Dune Analytics dashboard supports this finding, pegging the user base to a minimum of 80,000, with a noticeable addition of 15,000 users only from the previous Sunday.
Lastly, the recent spread between bitcoin’s next month and front month futures contracts trading on the CME and bitcoin’s price in the spot market remains noticeably elevated post a 10% slide last week. The continuous representation of negative spread historically has generally signaled interim or full-fledged bear market lows. However, only time will tell the future trajectory.
Source: Coindesk
