The Stablecoin Rush

Daily Updates:

• This week has marked a number of notable new developments in the stablecoin space: 

1. We covered yesterday that President Trump’s crypto-backed project, World Liberty Financial, plans to launch its own dollar-backed stablecoin USD1. Read our full deep dive on that project here. 

2. The State of Wyoming has deployed its own state-issued stablecoin, named Wyoming Stable Token (WYST), on testnets for Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon and Base, and could launch as soon as July.

• The proposed Wyoming stable token will be “fully backed by U.S. Treasuries, cash, and repurchase agreements. It will maintain a statutory requirement of not less than 102% capitalization to bolster stability”.
• Wyoming plans to use the yield earned from the reserve assets used to back the supply of WST to fund education and infrastructure.

3. Fidelity Investments is testing its own stablecoin that will be managed by the digital assets division of the firm. The news comes after Fidelity announced plans to offer a tokenised version of its Treasury Digital Fund (FYHXX), which holds cash and U.S. Treasury securities. 

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• President Trump has signed a proclamation that will implement a 25% tariff on all auto imports, including fully assembled “cars that are not made in the United States” as well as key automobile parts. The tariffs are due to go into effect on April 2, the same date Trump has marked as the announcement for his reciprocal tariffs program. 
• On his Truth.Social platform, the President also touted further large-scale tariffs on the European Union and Canada if they decide to work together and “do economic harm” on the US. 
• Risk-on equities ended the day lower after a brief reprieve in the earlier parts of this week. The S&P 500 slid 1.1% and the Nasdaq-100 fell 1.8%. BTC is currently rangebound close to $88K, whilst ETH, SOL and XRP are all down by 2-5% on the day. Only Binance’s BNB token is up amongst the top 10 tokens by market-cap.
• BTC and ETH’s term structure of volatility remains largely unchanged from yesterday as implied volatility levels at most have returned to the start of the month. BTC’s volatility smile skew for 7-day tenors has spiked up since yesterday however, from its put–skewed bearish levels to a more neutral positioning. Skew at all other tenors remains unchanged. 

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• After their Tuesday announcement to unanimously approve Bitcoin as treasury reserve asset, GameStop Corp. now intends to raise $1.3B via 0% Convertible Senior Notes to “qualified institutional investors” which mature in 2030. Those notes can be turned into shares of GameStop’s Class A common stock and will be used by the company “for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of Bitcoin”. 

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• The Senate voted 70-28 to repeal the DeFi IRS rule which sought to expand the definition of “brokers” to DeFi platforms. They deemed it as unworkable due to DeFi’s automated nature. With both the house and senate supporting an overturn of the rule, President Trump now has the final sign off. 
• Trump Media’s Truth.Fi is partnering with Crypto.com’s Foris Capital to offer ETFs featuring digital assets and US-focused securities. Set to debut in 2025, the ETFs will settle through Crypto.com’s backend technology and be available in the US, Europe, and Asia markets.
• MOVE token experienced a rally after Movement Network recovered $38M USDT from a banned malicious market maker and announced a buyback program using the recovered funds to ease selling pressure and support liquidity.

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• A trader on Hyperliquid, a perpetual swap DEX, opened a $6M short perp position on a small market-cap token JellyJelly ($JELLY). The trader had simultaneously covered their short position by going long the token on spot markets and pushed the spot price of the token up. 
• Indeed the token began to rally from a $20M market-cap to over $50M in the space of an hour given its small market cap. Given the size of the short position relative to the market cap of the $JELLY token, the position was forced into liquidation, with Hyperliquid’s ‘Hyperliquidity Provider (HLP)’ vault which manages liquidations on the exchange, forced to take over the short. 
• Faced with an unrealised loss of $12M from the position, Hyperliquid decided to delist JellyJelly and settled the position at the same entry price ($0.0095) the trader took on the short, essentially overriding the market oracle price in order to prevent the platform from bearing the huge loss. 

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day:

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