Conor Ryder News

tether is winning the race for the title of the crypto world's «least risky» asset. As a regional U.S. banking crisis widens and a regulatory crackdown on crypto firms deepens, investments within the cryptosphere are moving into tokens and coins perceived as relatively safe. Tether is already the top performer among stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to some fiat asset like the dollar — and has seen its market value soar since March. Its value is anchored by a 1-to-1 peg against a cache of dollars and a supply cap at around 85 billion tokens. Demand for the coin has been so strong that its peg has held above 1 since mid-April, hitting 1.002 last week.

bitcoin has been a surprise winner of the banking blowout. Yet investors aiming to amp up their bets face an ominous obstacle: a lack of liquidity that could trigger wild price swings. The price of the No.1 cryptocurrency has jumped 40% to around $27,700 since March 10, when the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) careered into mainstream markets. On the flip side, though, its liquidity is drying up. Bitcoin's market depth indicates the asset is at its lowest level of liquidity in 10 months, even lower than in the aftermath of the FTX collapse in November, according to data provider Kaiko. The market depth for the two leading trading pairs — bitcoin-dollar and bitcoin-tether — stands at 5,600 bitcoin, the equivalent of about $155 million, Kaiko said.

Kaiko Research, in what analysts said was likely a rush by investors to dump their sterling for the digital asset or profit from arbitrage. The pound fell to a record low against the dollar on Monday, having plunged the previous Friday after the UK government announced unfunded tax cuts. The volume of transactions in the bitcoin-sterling trading pair across eight major exchanges globally spiked to a record high of 846 million pounds ($920 million) on Monday, according to Kaiko Research, compared with an average of around 54.1 million pounds a day so far in 2022. The surge was likely due to traders swapping sterling for bitcoin, said James Butterfill, head of research at crypto firm CoinShares.

Bitcoin-sterling volumes spike to record high as British currency flounders

There is not enough liquidity in centralized and decentralized exchanges combined for the troubled crypto lender Celsius to sell their Lido staked ethereum (stETH) tokens on the open market, leaving over-the-counter (OTC) transactions as the only option, according to digital assets data provider Kaiko.