This Week in Coins: Investors Rehash Bitcoin’s ‘Safe-Haven’ Status as DeSantis Takes Aim at CBDCs
This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
Last week’s crypto mega rally slowed down this week. Even so, many leading coins still posted double-digit gains over the past seven days.
The upward price action was escalated by the crisis that hit Credit Suisse, which last Wednesday needed a $54 billion loan from the Swiss National Bank to shore up liquidity.
On Sunday, it was announced that domestic rival UBS had agreed to buy the ailing bank in an emergency deal worth more than $3 billion.
.
The banking news continued to drive investors towards risk-based banking alternatives, such as crypto.
Bitcoin (BTC) rallied amid the banking chaos, jumping from just over $20,000 on March 10 to trade at $27,537 at the time of writing. Ethereum’s growth was a similar story during the same period, rising from roughly $1,400 to today’s price of $1,740, per CoinGecko.
Several prominent figures in the industry pointed to Credit Suisse’s collapse, along with the collapses of crypto-friendly banks like Silvergate, Signature and Silicon Valley Bank — all of which happened this month — to publicize Bitcoin and resume its potential role as a “safe haven.” port” asset.
Another development on Bitcoin this week was the news that Solanaits biggest NFT marketplace, Magic Eden, added support for Ordinals, a protocol that enables crypto-savvy NFT fans to create non-fungible assets on Bitcoin without the need for high-functionality smart contracts like those on Ethereum or Solana.
On Friday, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals passed 550,000 thanks to the proliferation of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) copies on the network.
Other notable positive price movements this week included XRPwhich rose 21% to $0.46 and Litecoin (LTC) jumped 6.4% to $91.
Only three top thirty cryptocurrencies had significant losses this week: OKB token fell 16.1%, Cosmos Hub (ATOM) fell 16% to $11.18, and Toncoin (TON) sank 14% to $2.11.
Desantis leads CBDC attack
In the US this week, several prominent Republicans railed against the idea of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), essentially a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency that would be issued by the Federal Reserve.
Florida Governor DeSantis went first.
On Monday, he proposed an outright ban on CBDCs in his state. He announced the measure from a podium where the words “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar” could be read in the background.
He justified the measure by saying: “What [a] central bank’s digital currency is about monitoring Americans and controlling Americans. You open up a big can of worms, and you give a central bank enormous, enormous amounts of power, and they will use that power.”
Warren Davidson, a Republican representative for Ohio’s 8th congressional district, tweeted on Tuesday that CBDCs were an “Orwellian payment system” and shared a letter he wrote to his colleagues urging them to reject a CBDC.
On Wednesday, Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, aped DeSantis and proposed his own legislative pushback against the idea of a Fed cryptocurrency.
On the same day, the White House released this year’s Economic Report of the President.
In several places, the report conveyed Washington’s skeptical stance on crypto, calling it “highly volatile and prone to fraud” and saying it “often reflects an ignorance of basic economic principles that have been taught in economics and finance over centuries.”
Finally, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) thinly veiled crypto crackdown continued on Wednesday when the agency hit Coinbase with a Wells notice, alleging that the exchange’s investment products constitute unregistered securities.
