43rd Edition

This week in The Flippening, TL;DR

• Ethereum merge coming soon! How will it affect the prices of ETH?
• Binance will now allow you to convert crypto for fiat
• Ripple may soon announce its IPO

Top Highlights of the Week

August is all about the Ethereum Merge

Ethereum's move to proof of stake is likely to be on the cards in the next three months. Ethereum Foundation Justin Drake, also on the panel, noted there's a "strong desire to make this happen before [the] difficulty bomb in August. It would be interesting to see how it impacts the price of ETH over the coming months.

Binance enables selling of crypto for fiat currency

With a formal announcement published on its website, Binance discloses that it will allow the direct sale of cryptocurrency for 11 different fiat currencies. Users can sell their crypto and convert it to their fiat currencies.

Rippling through SEC, IPO exploration in sight!

Since December 2020, the SEC and Ripple have been in a courtroom battle over XRP. Its ambitious plans of coming up with an IPO can be quite challenging considering the current bearish market conditions.

Other Highlights:

• a16z announces new $4.5 billion crypto fund: Read it here
• Brave adds Solana support and ramp wallet functionality in latest browser update: Read it here
• Balenciaga to accept Bitcoin, Ether as payment: Read it here
• Terra community approves Do Kwon's plans to revive project: Read it here

Disclaimer: All price movements are recorded up to 10:00 AM UTC

It has yet another week of market correction. Many of the top cryptos witnessed significant declines, with SOLANA facing the brunt of the blow, falling more than 20%.

Disclaimer: All price movements are recorded up to 10:00 AM UTC

Even though some of the top cryptos ended the week in red, on a sectoral level all the sectors ended the week with modest gains. This is why investing in sectors is more prudent than individual cryptos. With Mudrex Coin Sets, you can invest across different sectors in one click!

Coin of the week

Polygon MATIC: $MATIC

This has been a tough couple of weeks for crypto investors. With bear markets providing a good chance to find fundamentally strong projects, our coin of the week is Algorand. The ALGO community has been hard at work expanding its ecosystem. Dozens of dApps have been deployed in the past few months, and there's hundreds of millions in total value locked in its DeFi protocols, with tens of thousands of users.

 Crypto simplified

The TerraUSD fiasco has put the entire stablecoin ecosystem under scrutiny, with people going as far as contemplating if stablecoins even have a future.
Earlier this month, the UST token lost its peg to the U.S dollar leading to its accompanying cryptocurrency LUNA plummeting to its lowest point ever. Followed by leading exchanges delisting them and their price pushing further down to almost nothing.
But before we arrive at whether stablecoins hold any value, we need to first understand what a stablecoin is meant to be. They are meant to maintain their peg to a fiat currency. For instance, 1 USDC = $1! It needs to always be this way!
The most tried and trusted way to achieve this is by backing stablecoins with external assets like fiat, gold etc. But UST was not backed by any external asset; instead, its value was maintained by burning or minting LUNA. And historically, all algorithmic stablecoins have had a similar fate. There may be exceptions to this, e.g. DAI, but what made things worse for UST and LUNA was their association with the Anchor Protocol, which promised returns of almost 20% to lenders.
Their focus swiftly shifted from being a stablecoin to becoming a yield generating mechanism.
On the other hand, cryptocurrencies that have cracked the code of being a stablecoin at their core have thrived.
For instance, USDC, a stablecoin created by Circle, has successfully maintained its value time and again. It is backed by U.S. dollar-denominated assets held at regulated and audited U.S. financial institutions.
So stablecoins may not be doomed till they remain one.

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 Here we are, at the end of our 43nd edition. We hope you liked reading it. The team would love to hear back from you.