This week in coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum prices edge up slightly after PayPal launches stablecoin

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

Leading cryptocurrencies finally collapsed six week stay poor price performance or inertia this week.

Market leader Bitcoin (BTC) increased its market value by a modest 1.5% over the seven days to trade at $29,408 on Saturday.

According to the Current weekly report According to CoinShares, last week was a strong indicator that institutional investors have done so has stopped short selling the key currency For the first time in fourteen weeks.

Meanwhile, Ethereum (ETH), the second largest coin by market cap, appeared to be matching the pace of the top coin, gaining 1.3% to start at $1,851 over the weekend.

The top 30 cryptocurrencies did not see any notable price declines. However, three altcoins saw significant gains.

Solana (SOL) is up 8.5% to its current price of $24.55; Toncoin (TON) is up 10.1% to hit $1.32 and Shiba Inu (SHIB) is up 17.8% to trade at $0.00001108.

Shiba Inu appears to have maintained the momentum of last week’s rally, which started with news that the coin’s makers are ditching their reputation as a memecoin and launching one new identity protocol for all apps in the ecosystem for more security and privacy.

Overall, the market posted modest gains this week as US inflation readings pointed to a continuation in July cooling down.

In the news…

This week brought with it a fairly busy and varied news cycle, with institutional and global launch stories grabbing attention alongside the Fed’s new stablecoin note and the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s face-saving tactics in its failed war on crypto pulled.

On Monday, payments giant PayPal announced that it would release an Ethereum-based dollar-pegged stablecoin called PayPal USD (PYUSD).

The currency will be issued by Paxos and is set to become “a part of the overall payment infrastructure,” according to a media quote by PayPal CEO Dan Schulman.

Starting next month, Paxos will publish monthly reserve reports and third-party confirmations of PYUSD’s reserves so the public can keep track of the credibility and value of the assets that underpin the stablecoin’s value.

Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) expressed her concerns in a written statement: “I am deeply concerned that PayPal has decided to launch its own stablecoin, despite the lack of a federal framework for regulating, overseeing and enforcing these assets. […] Given PayPal’s size and reach, government oversight and enforcement of its stablecoin operations is critical.”

On Tuesday, Brazil announced the name of its new central bank digital currency (CBDC): DREX or “digitally real”— The name is almost an acronym for “Digital Real Electronic Transaction”.

The digital real is a centrally issued tokenized real that uses distributed ledger technology similar to blockchain, but is not without controversy.

Earlier last month, the Brazilian central bank published the code of the pilot on its GitHub profile. Developers thus discovered several problematic functions within the smart contract.

The skills Measures granted to the central bank include the ability to freeze user accounts, reduce target balances, confiscate and mint new units of digital currency. This, in turn, has drawn criticism because the project is enforcing the very kind of centralization that the cryptocurrency was created to avoid.

On this day, Binance announced this secured licenses to operate in El Salvador, a country where bitcoin is legal tender. Binance came under the SEC spotlight in the US after the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission sued the company for violating securities laws and also alleging that Binance executives were involved in commingling customer funds and market manipulation.

Also that day, the Federal Reserve issued one opinion Announcing new guidance for licensed banks dealing in dollar-linked business stablecoins. It also said it would step up its “novel activity monitoring program” for banks trading cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency companies under its jurisdiction.

In particular, the Fed wants to oversee the transaction validation process, including the “timing and finality of settlement of transactions, the potential irreversibility of transactions, and the central authority of transaction records.”

The statement notes that the Fed will implement Know Your Client (KYC) measures and ensure state-licensed banks have appropriate risk mitigation strategies in place.

On Friday, the SEC announced that it plans to do so Appealed Judge Torres’ landmark ruling in the agency’s ongoing lawsuit against Ripple for — you guessed it — violating securities laws.

Torres decided that Ripple’s XRP was this not a security by definition but could also be presented as a unit depending on the type of sale. Their ruling substantially contradicted the SEC’s contention that retail offerings through exchanges constitute offerings of securities.

The following day, the SEC again played for time and delayed his decision to approve or deny a high profile spot bitcoin exchange traded fund application from ARK 21Shares.

Finally, on Saturday, payments giant Visa announced an experimental solution for the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to do so Pay fuel fees with Visa Credit or Debit Cards.

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