The Coming Crypto Crisis

FT's cryptocurrency coverage has been abysmal for years now, and this continues the pattern. And I speak as somewhat of a crypto skeptic!

>First, the Genius Act (like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000) is being marketed as a way to make crypto safer, with stablecoins backed one to one by US dollars.

>But that doesn’t make what is, more broadly, a volatile asset class any less volatile. Indeed, it may only make the overall market more so.

This doesn't even make logical sense. Yes, regulating stablecoins so that they are backed one to one and audited, verse being a pseudo black box like many of them are today, absolutely makes that area of crypto safer!

No, it won't magically lower the beta of BTC. A stablecoin bill won't regulate volatility of an entirely different crypto asset. How obvious can you get.

Then we have the classic fear-mongering clickbait headline that is shameful to be running on FT.

Finally the short pretty meaningless article just tapers off into a quick end. I'm not even sure what the crisis is supposed to be. There's not enough regulations so it's going to repeat 2008?

The funny thing is there are so many interesting angles to pursue here, but the author is so incredibly obviously ignorant and close minded to the space (as was FT on the whole when I was a subscriber) that they don't have the ability to add anything of substance.

I'll do the work for the author. If we see institutional rehypothecation of crypto and systemic leverage generated through stable coin lending, and those stable coins are backed by t-bills, then a "bank run" could cause a repo crisis in the real banking system that the central bank is toothless to slow down. If you hold a pile of digital dollars that suddenly look shaky (let's see during the initial wave of quantum computing hacks of latent Bitcoin addresses with known public addresses in coming years), there's very little stopping a sort of bankrun phenomenon where everyone is incentivized to swap their digital dollars for actual paper, which would slam ungodly amounts of treasuries onto the market and collapse repo by making bond volatility go absolutely through the roof. That could create a flash crisis and blow up the basis trade, like we saw in 2020 (the financial meltdown bin was caused by the basis trade unwinding more than anything else).

That would be an interesting article. And I can come up with 10 more as well, but it's not like FT would ever actually write about something interesting in the space like that...