Stablecoin

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a fixed value, almost always one US dollar. They are the settlement asset for most crypto trading and, increasingly, for cross-border payments that never touch a public exchange. The two largest — USDT and USDC — are backed by reserves held off-chain, which makes reserve composition and attestation the thing worth watching rather than the peg itself.

What we track on this desk

• Reserves and attestations. What backs each token, who verifies it, and how often. An attestation is not an audit, and the difference matters.
• Supply changes. Mints and burns, which are a reasonable proxy for capital entering or leaving crypto markets.
• Regulation. MiCA in Europe, US legislative attempts, and central-bank rulebooks for systemic issuers — see the Regulation desk.
• Depeg events. Rare, brief and heavily reported. Usually a liquidity problem on one venue rather than a solvency problem at the issuer.
• Payments adoption. Remittance corridors, merchant settlement and bank pilots — the part of crypto with the clearest real-world use.

How to read a stablecoin story here

Peg deviations are the most over-reported event in this category. A quote of $0.998 on one exchange is an order-book artefact, not a de-pegging; it becomes a story when it persists, appears across venues, and the issuer’s redemption process is implicated. We report the venue and the duration rather than the headline number alone.

Reserve reporting is the opposite problem — under-covered because it is dull. Composition changes, particularly the mix of Treasury bills against commercial paper and repo, tell you more about issuer risk than any single day’s peg. Where issuers and analysts disagree on what the reserves contain, the story is marked Disputed and both positions are shown.

Where to go next

Read the Verification Center for how publishers are counted, or the Regulation desk for the rules being written around these tokens.