Welcome to the CoinSmart crypto recap. Let’s look at the hottest stories that came up this past week. Here is an overview:
- USDC loses and regains the dollar peg.
- Ethereum and Cardano are coming up with huge upgrades.
USDC loses and regains dollar peg
On Friday, March 10, USDC lost its peg to the U.S. dollar following a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank. The company disclosed that $3.3 billion of its cash reserves was held by the bank. Overnight USDC fell to $0.87, its lowest point since 2019. However, the stablecoin has since regained its peg. Circle announced that it had cleared a vast majority of the redemption and minting requests for USDC.
“As of close of US banking operations Wednesday, the 15th of March, we have cleared substantially all of the backlog of minting and redemption requests for USDC. Since Monday morning, Circle has redeemed $3.8 billion USDC and minted $0.8 billion USDC. The events of the past week have impacted the liquidity operations for USDC. Circle has worked tirelessly to re-initiate services with alternative banking partners, particularly payment and USDC redemption services. We would like to thank our customers for their patience during these unprecedented times.”
Circle has also found a new banking partner in Cross River Bank.
Ethereum and Cardano upgrades
The upcoming Cardano Mithril upgrade is a stake-based signature scheme that improves the speed and efficiency of syncing times for nodes joining the Cardano network. This is achieved by using the present network to provide certified snapshots of all or part of the blockchain state. This allows new nodes to join the network more quickly and efficiently, as they do not need to download and verify each block individually.
Meanwhile, Ethereum core devs successfully launched the Shanghai/Capella upgrade on the Goerli testnet on Tuesday, March 14. The mainnet launch is expected in early April 2023. The upgrade’s primary focus will be ether (ETH) staking withdrawals.
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