This week in coins: Investors resume bitcoin’s “safe-haven” status as DeSantis targets CBDCs

This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

Last week’s crypto mega rally slowed down this week. Nonetheless, many leading coins were still posting double-digit gains over the past seven days.

The upward price action was escalated by the crisis at Credit Suisse, which last Wednesday needed a $54 billion loan from the Swiss National Bank to shore up liquidity.

On Sunday there was an announcement that domestic rival UBS had agreed to buy the ailing bank in an emergency deal worth over $3 billion.

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Banking news continued to push investors toward risky banking alternatives like crypto.

Bitcoin (BTC) surged amid the banking chaos, going from just over $20,000 on March 10 to $27,537 at the time of writing. Ethereum’s growth has been similar over the same period, going from around $1,400 to today’s price of $1,740 per CoinGecko.

Several prominent industry figures pointed to the collapse of Credit Suisse, alongside the collapses of crypto-friendly banks like Silvergate, Signature, and Silicon Valley Bank — all of which happened this month — to publicly criticize Bitcoin and its potential role as a “safe.” “Reheat Port” asset.

Another development in Bitcoin this week was the news that Solanais the largest NFT Marketplace, Magic Eden, added support for Ordinals, a protocol that allows crypto-savvy NFT fans to mint non-fungible assets on Bitcoin without the need for highly functional smart contracts like those on Ethereum or Solana.

On Friday, the number of bitcoin ordinals surpassed 550,000 thanks to the proliferation of copies of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) on the network.

Other notable positive price moves this week included XRPwhich rose 21% to $0.46 and Litecoin (LTC) rose 6.4% to $91.

Only three of the top 30 cryptocurrencies saw significant losses this week: OKB token fell 16.1%, Cosmos Hub (ATOM) fell 16% to $11.18 and Toncoin (TON) fell 14% to 2 .11$.

Desantis leads the CBDC attack

In the US this week, several prominent Republicans rebelled against the idea of ​​a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), essentially a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency that would be issued by the Federal Reserve.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was the first to do so.

On Monday, he proposed an outright ban on CBDCs in his state. He announced the move from a podium with the words “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar” written in the background.

He justified the measure with: “What [a] Central bank digital currency is about policing Americans and controlling Americans. You open a big can of worms and you give a central bank huge, huge amounts of power, and they’re going to use that power.”

Warren Davidson, a Republican representative from Ohio’s 8th congressional district, tweeted Tuesday that CBDCs are an “Orwellian payment system,” and shared a letter he wrote to his colleagues urging them to oppose a CBDC.

On Wednesday, Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, mimicked DeSantis and proposed his own legislative opposition to the idea of ​​a Fed cryptocurrency.

On the same day, the White House released this year’s Presidential Economic Report.

At several points, the report conveyed Washington’s skeptical stance on crypto, calling it “highly volatile and prone to fraud” and saying it “often reflects an ignorance of fundamental economic principles learned in economics and finance over centuries.”

Finally, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) thinly-veiled crypto crackdown continued on Wednesday, when the agency hit Coinbase with a Wells Notice alleging that the exchange’s staking products constitute unregistered securities.

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