Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency firms in the industry, has published a blog post that tells users to “switch to the trusted and reputable digital dollar,” referring to the stablecoin asset usd coin. The company’s blog post specifically mentions switching the stablecoin asset tether over to usd coin, and the firm is offering “zero fees” to swap these two tokens.
Coinbase Offers Zero Fees For Users To Switch From Tether To USD Coin, Crypto Community Questions Motive
On Thursday, December 8th, 2022, Coinbase shared a new blog post and Tweeted Statement: “Switch to a trusted stablecoin: USD Coin (USDC). Convert Tether (USDT) to USDC now with zero fees.” The company’s blog post goes into more detail as it notes that customers can swap Tether (USDT) for USD Coin (USDC) “with zero fees.” The blog post explained that the events of the past few weeks have shaken the confidence of the crypto industry.
“The events of the past few weeks have put some stablecoins to the test and we’ve seen a flight to safety,” Coinbase’s blog post explains. “We believe that [usd coin] (USDC) is a trusted and reputable stablecoin, so we’re making it more frictionless to switch: starting today we’re waiving fees for global retail customers to convert USDT to USDC.”
Coinbase’s statements gave crypto supporters the impression that the blog post was indirectly questioning Tether’s stablecoin, the largest stablecoin by market cap today. “Bullets fired. Bang bang,” the Twitter account known as Autism Capital answered to Coinbase’s tweet about the topic. Many other crypto supporters disagree with Coinbase’s statements. Gábor Gurbacs, a strategy advisor to Vanek, said that it was more likely that people would choose USDT.
“Tether was the first stablecoin in the world and has been trusted by millions around the world since its inception,” Gurbacs said in a response to Coinbase’s tweet on Thursday. “In fact if you ask people outside a narrow group in the U.S. they’d pick tether over USDC,” Gurbacs added.
Twitter account known as Byzantine General wrote: “It is not good to see. Desperate are also seen. I have a little less confidence in USDC.” Operators of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Curve Finance found a humorous ray of hope in the situation when the DeFi platform’s Twitter account Tweeted,
Yes, let’s shift back and forth really often. Loving it.
Coinbase’s statement follows recent auto-conversion from USDC to trading events at Binance and Wazirx. Furthermore, the market valuation of USDC has declined significantly during the past few months. The market cap of USDC reached an all-time high of over 56 billion nominal US dollars in June 2022.
Today, the USDC market cap is 23.57% lower at $42.80 billion. Tether’s market cap, however, has shrunk a great deal as well, sliding from a high of more than 83 billion nominal U.S. dollars to today’s $65.86 billion. Tether’s market cap hit the $83 billion high in April 2022 and now it’s 20.65% lower according to statistics recorded on Dec. 9, 2022.
