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Stablecoins see biggest drop since 2022 crypto winter led by Tether (USDT), Circle’s USDC decline

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Stablecoins see biggest drop since 2022 crypto winter led by Tether (USDT), Circle’s USDC decline

The combined market capitalization of major stablecoins fell from roughly $166 billion in March 2022 to $122 billion by September 2023, RWA.xyz data shows — a decline of over 26% as investors pulled money from the digital asset market.

Tether’s USDT fell from $78 billion to $65 billion between March and November 2022. For USDC, the downtrend took much longer to play out, falling from $55 billion in July 2022 to below $24 billion by November 2023, exacerbated by its banking partner Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in 2023 March.

The implosion of TerraUSD, the algorithmic stablecoin of the Terra-Luna crypto project, also wiped out $18 billion from the stablecoin market.

The current decline is only a temporary setback in a long-term uptrend, one analyst said.

“The recent decline in stablecoin market cap represents a relatively small pullback in what we believe is a long-term growth market,” said Paul Howard, senior director at trading firm Wincent.

“Short-term fluctuations in liquidity are normal, but they don’t change our view that stablecoins will continue to play an increasingly important role in the digital asset ecosystem,” he added.

Increasing stablecoin competition

Looking beyond the headline decline, the trend appears more nuanced.

Part of the slowdown reflects a changing competitive landscape. As stablecoins move beyond crypto trading and into mainstream payments, new issuers have entered the market following regulatory progress such as the GENIUS Act in the U.S.

Cambridge Compares Ethereum Energy Use With PoS Networks

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Cambridge Compares Ethereum Energy Use With PoS Networks

A new Cambridge study placed Ethereum near the lower end of energy intensity among major proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, although the network still used more electricity overall than most of the PoS networks studied.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimated that Ethereum consumes about 7.87 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity annually. When adjusted for market value, the network used roughly 33 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per $1 million, the second-lowest figure among the proof-of-stake networks assessed, behind BNB Chain.

Solana used the most electricity among the PoS networks studied, at about 13.48 GWh per year. Its energy intensity was roughly 283 kWh per $1 million of market value, around 8.5 times Ethereum’s, while the networks in the comparison consumed about 38 GWh combined.

The report provides one of the most detailed assessments yet of Ethereum’s post-Merge footprint, giving policymakers and investors a more current basis for comparing blockchain sustainability.

Illustration of post-Merge Ethereum consumption. Source: Cambridge

New estimates map Ethereum’s energy use

Cambridge measured how much electricity Ethereum nodes used at the wall across 20 combinations of the network’s main software clients. It found that a typical home setup used about 18 watts, while a more powerful workstation used roughly 153 watts.

Using Ethereum’s mix of residential and professionally hosted nodes, the researchers estimated an average power draw of about 105 watts per node. Cambridge counted around 8,522 discoverable full nodes, with 64% running in cloud or enterprise facilities and 36% on residential connections.

Cambridge said Ethereum’s remaining emissions are now driven mainly by the electricity grids supplying its nodes. The study estimated that about 56.4% of the network’s electricity mix came from renewable and nuclear sources, compared with 43.6% from fossil fuels.

Related: Vitalik Buterin shares priorities for new ‘Lean Ethereum’ strawmap

Ethereum moved from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake validation through the Merge in September 2022. The Merge replaced miners competing with one another using energy-intensive computing equipment with validators who secure the network by staking Ether.

After the Merge, energy estimates showed that the upgrade had reduced the network’s electricity use by more than 99.9%, as the mining process used to secure the blockchain was removed. 

Magazine: Bitcoin nearing late stages of bear market: Jamie Coutts, Real Vision

Zapper to Shut Down Aug. 3 After Nearly Seven Years

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Zapper to Shut Down Aug. 3 After Nearly Seven Years

The DeFi portfolio tracker once handled $13 billion in transaction volume and 2 million monthly users before deciding an orderly wind-down was its best option.

Zapper, the DeFi portfolio tracker and dashboard, will shut down entirely on August 3rd, co-founder and CEO Seb Audet said in a post on X Wednesday. The company’s website, mobile apps and API services will all go offline.

Audet said the team “evaluated a number of different options, pursued some to the fullest extent possible,” before concluding that an orderly wind down is the best course of action. Existing API users will receive transition guidance by email, he said.

Seven-Year Run

Zapper launched in 2019 as a simple portfolio tracker Audet built for himself while exploring early DeFi, before scaling into a broader dashboard for tracking liquidity pools, yield farms and claimable rewards. At its peak, the platform served more than 2 million monthly active users and processed over $13 billion in transaction volume, according to Audet.

The company raised a $1.5 million seed round in early 2020 after winning a Kyber DeFi hackathon, then closed a $15 million Series A in May 2021 led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures. The Defiant covered Zapper’s growth in 2021 and again in 2022 as it expanded into NFTs and web3 social tools.

Audet said he is fielding interest in hiring the Zapper team, describing them as having “deep onchain engineering expertise” and operational experience running a product at scale.

MARA Buys Texas Site From HIF in $600M Bitcoin, AI Deal

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MARA Buys Texas Site From HIF in $600M Bitcoin, AI Deal

The 1,200-acre Matagorda County site was previously slated for a $7 billion HIF Global e-fuels plant backed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott before HIF pivoted to power computing instead.

MARA Holdings said Thursday it signed a definitive agreement with HIF to acquire a powered land site of more than 1,200 acres in Matagorda County, Texas, in a post on its official X account. The site will carry up to 1 gigawatt of grid capacity by October 2027 and up to 2 gigawatts by April 2028, subject to approval from Texas grid operator ERCOT.

The deal is not an upfront cash purchase. It is structured as up to $600 million in milestone-based payments tied to regulatory approvals, land access and eventually a signed data-center tenant, according to an SEC filing MARA disclosed, as reported by The Block. MARA shares rose roughly 14% in early trading Thursday on the news, The Block reported.

HIF Global had promoted the site as the first large e-fuels plant in the United States, a roughly $7 billion project backed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that would split water to make cleaner shipping fuel, BeInCrypto reported. HIF had already secured full permits and grid rights for about 1.8 gigawatts before the deal, and will retain a minority stake in the site once MARA signs a high-performance-computing tenant.

Doubling The Power Pipeline

MARA plans to develop the campus through its existing partnership with Starwood Digital Ventures, which handles design, construction and tenant sourcing. Combined with MARA’s pending Long Ridge Energy gas-plant acquisition, full energization of the Texas site would push the miner’s total power portfolio to roughly 4.8 gigawatts, The Block reported. MARA Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said sites with access to reliable, scalable power will become increasingly valuable, according to the same report.

Aave Labs Launches Stable Vaults for Fintech Stablecoin Yield

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Aave Labs Launches Stable Vaults for Fintech Stablecoin Yield

The vaults convert Aave’s variable lending rates into fixed yields that wallets, exchanges and payment apps can offer their own users.

Aave Labs launched Stable Vaults on Thursday, infrastructure that lets fintechs, wallets, exchanges and payment providers embed fixed-rate stablecoin yield into their own products, the company said in a blog post.

The vaults convert variable onchain lending rates, drawn from Aave V3 and V4 markets or other ERC-4626 strategies, into a fixed rate a business sets for its end users. Aave Labs handles the rebalancing and cross-chain operations in between, according to the blog post.

Already Live in Aave’s Own App

Stable Vaults are “the smart contract vaults that already power the Aave mobile savings app,” per the post, and are now open for any business to build on. Aave, the largest DeFi lending protocol with $12.80 billion in total value locked, said Chainlink Price Feeds and CCIP can support any Stable Vaults deployment and will power its own app’s production version.

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov said on X the product offers “fixed yield, cross-chain access, multi-strategy allocation, tier-based rates, and more,” and is “now available to businesses looking to offer stablecoin yield to their users.”

What Operators Control

Businesses choose which stablecoins to accept, which yield strategies to use, and what fixed rate to offer each user, according to the blog post. Any yield the underlying strategy earns above the promised rate goes to the vault operator as revenue, letting the product function as an on-chain fixed-income model rather than a pass-through of Aave’s floating rates.

Aave cited possible use cases including a neobank embedding savings powered by Aave markets, a payments company earning on idle settlement balances, and a wallet or exchange adding a one-tap earn feature backed by Savings GHO.

The launch follows Aave’s October acquisition of Stable Finance and a March proposal for a GHO-based savings product, part of a broader push to bring DeFi yield to mainstream consumer apps.

Ripple once weighed shutting down and handing XRP to shareholders, CEO says

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Ripple once weighed shutting down and handing XRP to shareholders, CEO says

Ripple came close to shutting down rather than fighting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Chief Executive Brad Garlinghouse said, describing a decision he and co-founder Chris Larsen faced after the agency sued the company in 2020.

Speaking at the University of Kansas School of Business earlier this week, Garlinghouse said the two seriously considered winding Ripple down and distributing its XRP holdings to shareholders. He described that as the easier path, against a government he said had “infinite power and resources.”

Ripple holds a large amount of XRP, and Garlinghouse said the company could have handed it to shareholders on a pro rata basis and dissolved, effectively ending the case by ending the company.

But they chose to fight because shutting down would have cost hundreds of jobs. “I’m glad in retrospect, but that was not obvious at the time,” he said.

Bitcoin, ether little changed as U.S. launches fresh Iran strikes

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Bitcoin, ether little changed as U.S. launches fresh Iran strikes

The muted response is the pattern now. When Iran first closed the Strait of Hormuz in early March, Brent crude jumped past $100 a barrel for the first time in four years and later peaked near $120, and bitcoin sold off sharply on each escalation.

Part of that is timing. Oil, equities and bonds are closed for the weekend, so bitcoin is the only large market open to price the strikes in real time, and it is treating them as close to a non-event.

The fuller cross-asset reaction, in crude especially, might not show until Monday. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil moves through Hormuz, and Brent had already carried a risk premium into the weekend after tanker traffic through the strait stayed below normal.

The real test comes Monday, however, if crude reopens with a sharp gap higher while bitcoin holds its ground. A calmer oil open would say the strait closure is being read as a threat Tehran has made and walked back before.

Arbitrum to Capture 10% of Fees From Robinhood Chain

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Arbitrum to Capture 10% of Fees From Robinhood Chain

Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder says every Arbitrum-based Layer 2, not just Arbitrum One, will now route a fee cut back to the ARB treasury.

Arbitrum will collect 10% of fees generated on Robinhood Chain and every other Layer 2 built on its technology stack, Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder said Wednesday on X. Of that cut, 8% goes to the tokenholder-controlled Arbitrum treasury and 2% funds development, he said.

Goldfeder framed the fee-sharing model as a revenue play tied to enterprise growth.

“As enterprise adoption is heating up, Arbitrum is well positioned to capture revenue,” he wrote, adding that Arbitrum One, the flagship rollup, sends 100% of its own fees to the treasury.

The disclosure clarifies how Arbitrum’s Orbit framework, the toolkit third parties use to launch custom Layer 2 and Layer 3 chains on Arbitrum’s stack, monetizes for ARB holders beyond the base chain.

Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 built on that stack, launched its mainnet July 1, adding tokenized stocks, onchain lending and agentic trading inside Robinhood’s app. The Defiant first reported Robinhood’s partnership with Arbitrum in February 2024.

An 8% treasury cut on external Orbit chains gives ARB a direct claim on fee volume generated outside Arbitrum’s own network, a structural shift from a chain that previously monetized only its own base-layer activity. The arrangement extends to any Orbit-based L2, not Robinhood Chain alone, per Goldfeder’s post.

The disclosure comes as Robinhood Chain sees early bridging activity, with several onchain trackers noting a sharp rise in ETH bridged to the new network in its first days live.

Bitcoin’s BIP 110 fork deadline nears with miner support at zero

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Bitcoin’s BIP 110 fork deadline nears with miner support at zero

Two of Bitcoin’s most influential figures came out against it on Saturday. Strategy founder Michael Saylor posted that “there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” arguing the proposal “turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.” The precedent, he wrote, is the real danger.

Adam Back, the Blockstream co-founder whose hashcash design is cited in the bitcoin white paper, made a similar case at greater length, addressed to the newcomers backing the proposal.

“Bitcoin respectfully says no to what you want,” he said, adding that their real recourse, if unconvinced, is to group together and fork away, but that “bitcoin won’t be joining it.”

The support data shows what the broader market really thinks. BIP 110 does not rely on the usual path of overwhelming miner approval, but uses a user-activated soft fork, a mechanism in which nodes enforce a rule whether or not miners agree, set to a 55% miner-signaling threshold rather than the traditional 95%.

Backing is absent even at that significantly lower bar.

Miner signaling has never risen above about 1% in any period and stands at zero in the current one, with no major mining pool behind it, according to the BIP 110 signaling monitor.

Among the nodes that store and relay the chain, adoption sits in the low single digits, carried almost entirely by Bitcoin Knots, an alternative to the dominant Bitcoin Core software.

Interpol Ties $122.5M Crypto Wallet to Romance Scam Ring

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Interpol Ties $122.5M Crypto Wallet to Romance Scam Ring

Thai police made two arrests as Interpol’s 97-country sweep logged 5,811 arrests and $293 million in intercepted assets.

A 20-year-old’s cryptocurrency wallet processed more than $122.5 million in suspected romance-scam proceeds over 10 months, Interpol said, after Thai police made two arrests tied to a cross-chain laundering scheme uncovered during a global crackdown.

The case surfaced from Operation First Light 2026, a sweep coordinated by Interpol that led to 5,811 arrests and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets across 97 countries and territories, the organization said in a statement posted to its official X account Thursday. The operation identified more than 142,000 victims worldwide, blocked 31,014 bank accounts, analyzed 152,808 cases and issued 99 Interpol Notices and Diffusions, using its Global Rapid Intervention of Payments mechanism to freeze both fiat and virtual assets.

Cross-Chain Laundering

The Thai case involved operators who funneled scam proceeds into a mix of cryptocurrencies and used cross-chain token swaps, shifting funds between blockchains to obscure the trail, according to Interpol’s report. The 20-year-old suspect’s wallet moved the $122.5 million over 10 months, one of the standout cases from the four-month operation, which ran from mid-January through the end of April.

“Criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets,” Tomonobu Kaya, who heads Interpol’s financial crime and anti-corruption center, said, adding that no country can stay safe unless all push back together. Romance scams, often called “pig butchering,” typically build trust over weeks before steering victims into fake crypto investments.

The bust adds to a string of recent crypto-linked fraud crackdowns, including $580 million seized from Chinese networks in February and a 24-person fraud sweep in Argentina in May.

To be sure, Interpol has not named the Thai suspects or specified which blockchains the cross-chain swaps ran through, and the full case details remain undisclosed pending prosecution. The organization did not break out how much of the $293 million total was cryptocurrency versus fiat.

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