CoinSpotMarket Update
Ethereum Excels As More Tech Giants Adopt Stablecoins
3 minutes
17 days ago
3 minutes
17 days ago
The price of Ethereum (ETH) has increased by 45% in the past week, at the time of writing, marking one of ETH’s strongest weekly gains in recent years. This rally has coincided with ETH dominance—which measures ETH’s market cap as a percentage of the combined market cap of all cryptocurrencies—returning to 9.8%, a level not seen since February.
Last week, Ethereum completed its ‘Pectra’ upgrade, its first major upgrade since March last year. Pectra's main features focus on improving Ethereum's scalability, staking efficiency, and overall user experience.
Several altcoins built on Ethereum have benefited from ETH’s resurgence. For example, Ethena (ENA), EigenLayer (EIGEN) and Pepe (PEPE) have increased by 75%, 66%, and 59%, respectively.
Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, announced it purchased another 13,390 BTC—worth $2.07B ($1.34B USD)—between May 5 and 11. The company, co-founded by Michael Saylor, currently holds 568,840 BTC, or 2.71% of the total supply. All indications suggest that Strategy will continue to accumulate over the coming weeks and months.
Last week, Stripe announced stablecoin-funded accounts, enabling merchants in over 100 countries to hold, send, and receive funds using stablecoins. This comes a few months after Stripe completed its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure business.
Stripe’s new account type will allow businesses to maintain balances in stablecoins, receive funds via crypto and fiat channels, and send stablecoins globally. In its announcement, Stripe highlighted that this product may benefit entrepreneurs in countries with unstable currencies, as they will now more easily be able to hold USD-based stablecoins (e.g. USDC).
Will Gaybrick, Stripe's president of product and business, announcing stablecoin-powered financial accounts (Source: Stripe)
Meta is planning to integrate stablecoins for cross-border payments, focusing on creator payouts, according to Fortune, citing sources familiar with the matter. The tech giant—which is behind social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—is also reportedly talking with crypto firms to adopt existing stablecoins (e.g. USDC, USDT) to help lower transaction costs for its billions of users.
These reports come several years after Meta, at the time known as Facebook, launched a stablecoin project that later fell through following a regulatory clampdown.
Various memecoins have been among the best performers in the market over the past fortnight, the opposite of what transpired throughout March and April when the market was trending lower. Below are some notable memecoins’ performance over the past 14 days:
Read more: Overview of Memecoins
