Ripples bid of $ 5 billion for the circle rejected
In another signal that Stablecoins becomes the lively product in Crypto, Ripple reportedly Made an offer from $ 4 billion to $ 5 billion to acquire Circle, the company behind USDC; However, the offer was rejected quickly – which does not come as a surprise.
Circle Prepares to become public, and USDC alone has a market value of $ 61.7 billion. An offer of less than $ 5 billion for a company that controls the second most dominant Stablecoin in the market was a deal sentenced from the beginning.
Ripples attempts, however, highlight some interesting things about Stablecoin space. To begin with, RippleThe company behind XRP, has tried to stay relevant in the Stablecoin space but has not found great success in that area. Its Stablecoin, Rlusd, has a market value of just $ 316.9 million – so 195 times less than USDC’s market value. This massive gap illustrates how much ripple would benefit from acquiring a Stablecoin -giant circle.
As you can imagine, Ripple has much more to win at a deal like this than Circle would do. However, Ripple could give an important advantage for the circle through its international reach. Ripple claim That 90% of their business operations are outside the United States, which can be useful if Circle wants to expand more aggressively abroad – but clearly not useful enough to take Ripple’s offer seriously.
The broader story here is that Stablecoins enters a phase of consolidation and competition. Whether, through mergers, acquisitions or aggressive innovation, large crypto players begin to fight for position in what quickly becomes one of the most critical batches in crypto. Even Tether recently announced that they are moving to launch a Stablecoin in the United States.
As regulatory clarity increases and financial institutions become more open to blockchain-driven solutions, I would expect more innovation, as well as M&A activity in the StableCoin space, as companies are trying to get ownership in the blockchain application that is currently working into the traditional financial system.
Mastercards StableCoin expansion
Stablecoin Innovation Streak continued this week, with Mastercard (Nasdaq: MA) disclosure A full service StableCoin transaction platform that allows consumers to spend StableCoins with a debit card (launch with OKX) and allows merchants to accept and discontinue payments in stablecoins.
“In the case of blockchain and digital assets, the benefits of mainstream use cases are clear,” mentioned Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard. “To realize their potential, we must make it just as easy for merchants to receive Stablecoin payments and for consumers to use them. We believe in Stablecos potential to streamline payments and trade throughout the value chain.”
It has become clear that major players in both global payments and digital asset sectors are increasing efforts to digest blockchain with traditional financing. Last week, Circle announced the launch of a global payment network built on blockchain and settled in Stablecoins. While different in structure, MasterCard’s movement points in the same direction: to provide Stablecoin’s real tools in addition to digital currency trading.
But an important difference between MasterCard’s offer and Circle’s payment network (CPN) is its intended audience; CPN is business-business and institution-focused, while Mastercard places its product as “a 360-degree strategy where consumers can spend Stablecoins and merchants can receive them”, which is clearly aimed at the everyday consumer.
This is where Mastercard’s approach can come to cards. The business case for merchants and financial institutions who use Stablecoins are clear – slower fees and faster settlement times are very meaningful. For the average consumer, however, the value proposal is to use stablecoins as if they make fiat currency unclear. Why would anyone pay in Stablecoins instead of Fiat or choose a StableCoin payment instead of reaching their credit card?
One case that will think about is potential tax benefits; If a user never technically “pays out” his crypto but instead converts it to Stablecoins and spends that balance directly, there may be tax efficiency. But beyond that, most consumers are unlikely to go out of their way of spending Stablecoins.
Anyway, this feature of Mastercard marks yet another step in identification Stablecoins as useful moneyNot just a secure haven for trading in refuge.
The state of Bitcoin mining
A new one Report from Coinshares shed some light on the stream Bitcoin -mine state. According to the data, the cost of breaking a single bitcoin was about $ 82,162 at the time of the report was published, which was almost identical to the price of bitcoin at that time. However, when non-contact costs that hardware depreciation has been taken in, it costs balloons to an average of $ 137,018 per bitcoin for listed mining companies that means that many companies work with a loss on every bitcoin they are mines at the latest price levels. And these figures are too large, well -capitalized mining operations. The situation is even worse for smaller players without economies of scale or access to cheap electricity.
The report explains, “Valuation multiples over the sector have compressed, which reflects a growing investor’s consensus that Bitcoin mining operations are increasingly similar to a zero-sum game-they receive a miner’s capacity directly eroding the market share for others.”
In other words, the only way to survive is to become more effective than everyone else, and by default, when these companies become more efficient, their competitors are left worse. This increases the total cost of mining a single bitcoin due to the change in competition. As a result, mining bitcoin becomes more difficult and more expensive for the day.
In response to this economic reality, some mining companies begin to turn. Several are starting to diversify to adjoining sectors such as data centering and HPC hosts for high performance (HPC), which can offer more stable and scalable revenue than bitcoin alone. Others are looking at distributing part of their computing power to artificial intelligence (AI) operations or switching to mining by other digital currencies that are currently more profitable.
All in all, the report indicates that unless a miner has the most advanced machines, works on a significant scale and has access to cheap power, whether they are a small operation or a listed company, they will be at loss unless the price of Bitcoin -Skyrocets.
Watch: Untangling Bitcoin Mining on Coeingeek Weekly Livestream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIKG9FCLPKQ Title = “Youtube video player” Ramborder = “0” Allow = “Accelerometer; Autoplay; Clipboard writing; encrypted media; Gyroscope; Image-in-Image; Web-Share” Reference Policy = “Strict-Origin-When-Cross-origin” Permitting Lorscreen = “” “” “
