🐳 Daily Edition: $300 Trillion in Stablecoins Were Minted Today?!

Onchain data shows the Total Value Locked (TVL) on Ethereum ballooned by a whopping $300 trillion today… wait that can’t be right can it? Well, for about 20 minutes this afternoon it seemed to be the case, as Paxos minted $300 trillion worth of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin before realizing its mistake and burning the tokens. While this was an accident, it does highlight two important things: 1) Paxos paid just $2.66 in gas fees for a “$300 trillion” transaction, and 2) if this was just a fat finger as Paxos stated but PYUSD is supposed to be backed 1:1 with dollars, then how was it possible for this transaction to go through without a matching amount of US dollars (for context, the global GDP is about $100 trillion)? Paxos and PayPal are both veterans of the payments world and I’m not calling into question the validity of their business, but for a mistake of this quantity to just happen is a little disconcerting.

On the trading side most of the market is down today, still in recovery mode after the flash crash of October 10th. This makes sense of course given the sheer size of liquidations that day, but we should also expect things to chop until the “Trade War” with China settles down. The price of Gold continues to surge as weary investors look for a safe haven to place their capital in, which typically isn’t a good sign for risk assets like the crypto market. Our saving grace there so far this year has been Bitcoin’s tendency to trade in line with Gold, which goes with the narrative of Bitcoin being its digital equivalent. Recently we’ve seen these two decouple, which isn’t necessarily bearish BTC but rather something to keep an eye on as it develops as that has been a driving factor in its monster run.

Finally, despite market turmoil we have two major chain and token launches set to hit before the end of the year in Monad and MegaETH. Monad has been clowned repeatedly for its delays and gigantic raises (Monad reportedly raised $225M at a $3B valuation in 2024), but it has maintained attention over the last 2 years with no product which is honestly pretty impressive. MegaETH on the other hand has taken a far more “crypto native” approach, and is the one I’m more looking forward to personally.* Regardless, these are both highly anticipated launches and worth paying attention to!

Litecoin intern deserves a raise

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• Crypto’s hedge-appeal cracks as Gold wins big on debasement fear

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Sony wants its own crypto bank too

• Coinbase to invest in India’s CoinDCX, expand in South Asia and the Middle East

Upcoming Launches

• Monad opens airdrop to Solana users, Ethereum NFT holders as MON launch nears

• MegaETH to launch public token sale on Echo’s Sonar platform

Interesting Reads

• Paxos mistakenly issues $300 trillion of PayPal stablecoin

• Sam Bankman-Fried claims Biden administration targeted him over GOP donations (yeah ok bro)

• Crypto’s $19 billion wipeout shows risks of centralization

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