The rapid collapse of Bitcoin this week has become a real test for the entire crypto market. The price of the main digital asset fell by 10 thousand dollars during the day, which led to a serious drop in the value of the most popular altcoins.
Even the favorites of August and early September like Ethereum, Cardano and Solana showed significant correction. But how did stablecoins behave here?
Recall that stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of national currencies like the dollar or the euro. That is, the owner of 1,500 USDT can be confident that he can exchange them for 1,500 dollars.
At the same time, there are deviations in the behavior of the stables. During sharp changes in the market, massive purchases or sales of such cryptocurrencies also affect their value, since the price simply does not have time to bounce back.
For example, this is the chart of USDT, the largest by market capitalization, for the last month. Please note that the rate of the coin dropped to 98.56 cents, and also grew to 1.01 dollars.
Were stablecoins stable at the time of the market crash this week? Cointelegraph reporters tried to find the “most durable” stablecoin out of several popular coins in this niche.
Which stablecoin to choose
Stablecoins are especially important for risk mitigation, as buying such coins in the event of a potential collapse of the entire market allows you to save the dollar value of your portfolio. According to the CryptoQuant platform, during the Bitcoin crash on Tuesday, the volume of stablecoins transactions increased significantly. For example, this indicator for the most popular stablecoin Tether USDT increased from $ 4.02 to $ 10.51 billion in just a day.
Another USD Coin increased from $ 3.27 to $ 5.728 billion over the same period. At the same time, the volume of stablecoins in free circulation remained relatively stable, being around $ 67 billion .
Among the top 10 stablecoins that showed a slight deviation from their fixed price, there were six centralized, two mixed and two algorithmic coins. The screenshot below shows these projects with the average and maximum deviation from the stable price.
Recall that in addition to the usual stablecoins, backed by the bank reserves of their issuers, there are also algorithmic ones. In these projects, a stable price is maintained by automatically increasing or decreasing the supply of coins. An example of such a coin is DAI.
Here is the ranking of stablecoins. The leader here was USDC from Circle, which gave an average deviation of 0.196 cents. At the same time, USDT was trading 0.244 cents on average.
The potential risks of the collapse of stablecoins have attracted the attention of well-known world financiers more than once. For example, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in July that she sees a huge need for swift government action to regulate stablecoins, otherwise the area could become very volatile.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
Fitch ratings experts also voiced their fears of a collapse if a critical mass of Tether holders suddenly want to exchange their coins for real currency. In the face of inadequate coin reinforcement – we recall that Tether has previously been at the center of a major scandal over this – the price of USDT will not be easy to maintain. And problems with such a large project can cause instability in other coins on the crypto market.
Although we note that the crypto market has not encountered something like this for many years of its existence. Moreover, the total market capitalization of stablecoins is steadily growing. We have clarified the current data: now there are coins worth 123.44 billion dollars in the industry. Since the beginning of the year, the figure has almost quadrupled.
We believe that in general, stablecoins have withstood the events of this week with dignity and have shown real stability. Still, their rate was around the one dollar mark, which means you can rely on them. Accordingly, traders can still protect themselves from large losses using the so-called stop-loss orders – that is, orders to the exchange to sell a certain cryptocurrency in the event the rate falls to a certain level. In this case, the sale of coins can take place in exchange for stablecoins, and this will preserve the value of the portfolio.