⚱️ Tether launches first gold-backed digital asset

Sunday is here.

Welcome back to another newsletter from us at The Merge.

Sorry for the disappearance - we’re back for good now.

• ⚱️ Tether launches Alloy, a new gold-backed digital asset

• 🥇 First tokenised US T-Bill receives "A" credit rating from Moody's

• 🪙 Paypal recently launched their stablecoin PYUSD on Ethereum and Solana

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Global Market Overview

Currently, Real World Assets on-chain (excl stablecoins) are worth $10.54b (↑5.19% from last month).

There are 60,641 Total Asset Holders (↑4.37% from last month).

$8b is within Private Credit, $1.7b is in US Treasury Debt and $848.3m is in tokenised Commodities.

The top 3 networks are:🥇Ethereum (90.84b in Total Value Locked) 🥈Tron (60.63b in TVL) & 🥉Binance Smart Chain (5b in TVL).

Fancy taking a look for yourself? Check it out here.

So, what’s being tokenised this week?

Private Credit

Currently, there is $8.05b in active value loans & $12.54b total loan value across all protocols.

As of today, the top 3 current protocols with outstanding loans are🥇Figure ($7.4b) 🥈Centrifuge ($274m) & 🥉Maple Finance ($112m).

Top stories this week?

🌐 Open Eden Labs, a tokenised RWA vault have been awarded an “A” credit rating from Moody’s - becoming the first and only tokenised US Treasury product globally.

🍁 Syrup.fi is launching in 5 days! Syrup is a new protocol built upon the success of Maple Finance (institutional-focused) combining the strength of its infrastructure with open access to DeFi. Syrup enables permissionless access to secured lending for a much wider range of people.

Stablecoins

Currently, the market cap of stablecoins is $160.94b (↓0.94% from last month.)

As of today, it makes up 0.77% (↓0.41% from last month) of all M2 Money Supply with Monthly Transfer Volume totalling $2.16 trillion (↓16.58% from last month).

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Tether ($113.5b)🥈Circle ($29.5b) &🥉Maker DAO ($5.03b).

Top stories this week?

⚱️ Tether has launched Alloy, a new gold-backed digital asset. It combines the stability of Tether Gold with digital currency features, allowing users to mint as collateral for secure, gold-backed digital payments. See more from our post on Twitter here.

🍁 Stripe will start supporting global stablecoin payments in the form of Circles USDC and others this summer! Transactions will be instantly settled on-chain and automatically converted to fiat.

The founder of Stripe, John Collison hosted a demo back in April of the capabilities. Exciting times!

Commodities

Currently, the market cap of stablecoins is $848.29m (↑0.16% from last month).

As of today, the Monthly Transfer Volume totals $151.83m (↑17.38% from last month) with 54.7k addresses that are current holders.

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Paxos ($431.4m)🥈Tether ($388.7m) &🥉Aurus ($17.9m).

Top stories this week?

🪙 Transak, a web3 payments infrastructure provider, is listing PYUSD - PayPal’s recently launched stablecoin. Paypal has just recently launched on Solana as the second blockchain for support. The fiat-to-crypto onramp has come after the recent rollout from the likes of Phantom, crypto.com and Paxos.

Weekly Resource List

🌐 RWA.xyz: On-Chain RWA Analytics - NEW

Explore tokenised real-world assets and the investors, issuers and service providers participating in public blockchains. View protocol statistics, industry aggregate metrics, and the issuers all in one place (link)

🔎 Santiment: Crypto Intelligence Tool - NEW

A behaviour analytics platform for crypto, sourcing on-chain, social and development information on thousands of coins, including market signals. For RWA’s insights check out this (link) 

🔐 Coinbase Wallet: All-in-one easy-to-use crypto wallet - NEW

You’ve more than likely heard and probably used Coinbase, so no introduction is needed. This is by far one of the easiest and non-crypto native wallets to be picked up and used by anyone. They even have a ‘Simple Mode’ for beginners. (link) 

🔭 DeBank: Web3 Portfolio Tracker

When it’s difficult to keep track of what’s where - just sync up any of your wallets and see within seconds where things are. This new gem of a tool we stumbled across gives you a holistic overview of all your holdings across multiple blockchains in one place (link)

👻 Phantom Wallet: Multi-Chain Crypto Wallet

Becoming a favourite wallet to use across crypto. An easy-to-navigate cross-chain compatible wallet (you can use it for SOL & ETH etc) with a user interface that beats most of the competition out of the ballpark (link)

🦇 Arkham Insights: Smart Money Insights

An investment tool if you want to understand where ‘Smart Money’ (aka the market makers) are placing their bets then make sure to check it out (link) 

🦎 CoinGecko: Crypto Data and Analysis Platform

Keep up to date with prices, trading volumes, and crucial crypto data (link)

Other Industry News

Want to stay on the cutting edge?

Here’s what else is happening in crypto you should know about:

Ethereum ETFs are coming: According to theblock.co, Spot Ethereum issuers have posted fee and seed investment disclosures in the latest wave of amended fillings - ahead of the July 2nd deadline. This is a big deal because it gives a positive sentiment that the ETFs are more than likely to be approved, given the 19b-4 forms are approved. We think this means it’s only a matter of weeks (if that) before the S-1 forms are approved and trading can begin.

TON to take over: According to Pantera, they’re doubling down on its bet on the TON (Telegram) token to become “its biggest investment ever”. This is a big deal because Telegram has 930 million active users per month, and a huge % of them can be easily onboarded to utilise TON and its ecosystem.

SEC closes the book on ETH Investigation: According to theblock.co, Consensys announced on Tuesday that the SEC’s enforcement division notified the company they were concluding its investigation. This is a big deal because it signifies that Ether is more likely than not a security, although that wasn’t clearly expressed by Gary Gensler - chair of the SEC.

That’s it!

As always, thanks for reading.

Hit reply and let us know what you found most helpful this week —we’d love to hear from you!

See you next Sunday,

Merge