There is noticeably a trend regarding posts on Linkedin. Digital Bytes has been commenting on and posting various articles about how global financial institutions are building the required infrastructure to enable the safe custody, management, trading, and expansion of digital assets including stablecoins, DeFi, NFTs and Cryptos. The common thread we have identified are the names of the organisations viewing the posts, together with the very global nature in terms of the cities and countries of the people who are viewing the posts.

Last week Digital Bytes this post which highlighted Visa’s announcement of its plans to have USDC and U$-pegged stablecoins on its platform, and concluded that this announcement ought to give the $63billion stablecoin sector even more awareness and interest. Indeed, stablecoins are a very liquid asset class and in the last month have turned over $100billion on average a day. The table below gives a snapshot of the 2,000+ viewers in the first few days following the previously mentioned Linkedin post and, as can be seen by the names of the financial organisations and locations of those viewing it, the range is truly international with viewers working for some of the best-known regulated financial services organisations globally.

Source: TeamBlockchain/Linkedin

So far, in 2021, the pace of change and newsflow around cryptocurrencies has been very active. Last week, PayPal also jumped on the crypto bandwagon with its new ‘Checkout with Crypto’ (“PayPal converts users' crypto holdings to fiat currency at checkout, with no additional transaction fees”), allowing its US clients the facility of being able to pay for goods at 24 million online merchants around the world using a range of crypto currencies. 

The amount of stablecoins being held in exchange wallets

Source:Cryptoquant.com

This interest in stablecoins is undoubtedly expanding. French company, Coinhouse, has recently launched a Euro-backed stablecoin, with PwC France and Maghreb providing monthly attestations of the backing. Of real significance is the biggest stablecoin, Tether (with over $41billion of assets), having finally given the market comfort that it is, indeed, backed by reserves. Expect to see other payment platforms such as ApplePay, GooglePay, Mastercard, PayPal Square and SamsungPay all follow Visa's lead and start incorporating stablecoins too. It would seem that stablecoins are, in effect, preparing the way for government issued CBDCs…..