Citi’s Ronit Ghose warned that paying interest on stablecoin holdings could trigger bank outflows akin to the 1980s, driving up funding costs and credit prices. Paying interest on stablecoin deposits could spark a wave of bank outflows similar to the money market fund boom of the 1980s, Citi’s Future of Finance head Ronit Ghose warned in a report published Monday. According to the Financial Times, Ghose compared the potential outflows caused by paying interest on stablecoins to the rise of money market funds in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those funds ballooned from about $4 billion in 1975 to $235 billion in 1982, outpacing banks whose deposit rates were tightly regulated, Federal Reserve data showed. Withdrawals from bank accounts exceeded new deposits by $32 billion between 1981 and 1982. Read more
Onchain data suggests Ethereum is in the “belief” stage of the bull cycle amid fresh all-time highs, opening the door to potentially even higher prices. Key takeaways: Ether’s long-term holder net unrealized profit/loss indicator suggests the price has entered the “belief” phase. The market value to realized value suggests ETH is undervalued, with room to run toward $5,500. Read more
Crypto ETPs saw their biggest losses since March as outflows totaled $1.43 billion amid investor sentiment becoming "polarized," CoinShares' James Butterfill reported. Cryptocurrency investment products reversed an emerging inflow trend, with significant outflows last week as Bitcoin and Ether prices declined. Global crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) saw $1.43 billion of outflows last week, ending a two-week inflow run that brought in $4.3 billion, CoinShares reported on Monday. The outflows came amid Bitcoin (BTC) dipping from above $116,000 on Aug.18 to $112,000 by the end of the trading week, while Ether (ETH) tumbled below $4,100 on Tuesday after starting the week at around $4,250, according to CoinGecko. Read more
Crypto is building a new layer, not for money, but for truth. Markets, AI and protocols must fix the broken systems of science and verification. Opinion by: Sasha Shilina, founder of Episteme and researcher at Paradigm Research Institute In 2024, Nature reported a record-breaking number of scientific paper retractions: over 10,000 papers pulled from journals due to fraud, duplication or flawed methodology. Peer review, the long-revered backbone of academic legitimacy, is under siege. It’s too slow, too opaque and too easily gamed. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence models trained on this flawed data set generate confident but nonsensical output. Papers cite nonexistent studies. Research decisions are guided by influence, not inference. The internet, once hailed as a democratizing force for knowledge, is now a battleground of misinformation, clickbait and manipulated metrics. Read more