00:00[Music] Bitcoin has become a popular mainstream investment, but it's also known for its volatility
00:06You don't know if in a week's time the value will be 20 lower, 10 lower, 10 higher
00:13Its value fluctuates so much that few people would use it to buy everyday goods such as shampoo or a plane ticket
00:19Some crypto entrepreneurs say there's one way to change that: stable coins
00:23This is a really interesting one, USD coin, or USDC
00:26Stable coins are different from other cryptocurrencies in that they are pegged to assets like the U.S
00:32dollar or gold, which is meant to make them more stable
00:37They've grown particularly
00:41Popular among traders online in just a year, as Bitcoin hit new records, the market value of stablecoins has grown tenfold
00:46Facebook has announced plans to launch its own stablecoin, and Visa said it would create a stablecoin credit card, but a probe of one staplecoin exposed some potential risks with this system
00:54It's Tether
01:01The New York Attorney General had accused Tether, the most popular staple coin, of lying about the cash reserves it uses to guarantee its dollar peg
01:09Tether did not deny nor admit wrongdoing as part of a 2019 settlement, but agreed to release quarterly statements detailing its
01:15Reserves, so can stablecoins accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies in our daily lives, and will they change the way we pay for goods? According to its creators, Bitcoin was meant to allow direct payments without ever going through banks, but so far, it's been accepted by few companies with very few high-profile exceptions like Tesla
01:39Market analysts found that Bitcoin's price has at times jumped or crashed by as much as six thousand dollars in a day, but that hasn't been the case for stablecoins
01:46In the past year, the value of top stablecoins has fluctuated by as much as four cents to their one dollar
01:53Pegs, you can have reasonable assurance that in, you know, three months time, or six months time, or one week's time, it'll still be worth a hundred dollars, and that's what was missing in crypto before stable coins came along
02:06Alex Kern is an analyst who researches stable coins and other cryptocurrencies
02:11He says the first stable coins were created as early as 2014
02:15The 24-hour trading volume is often over 90 billion
02:19Bitcoin is a little over 50 billion, so it trades more often than Bitcoin
02:24Tether was pegged to the US dollar, and more than 200 other staple coins followed, some pegged to the euro or to the Korean wan
02:30others to commodities like gold, silver, or oil, or a combination of different assets
02:38On top of stability, stablecoins like Tether have another key advantage: speed
02:42Because this is digital money, transactions go through in a matter of seconds, faster than the three days it usually takes to wire US dollars or euros using traditional banks
02:51Stablecoins are also faster than Bitcoin because the payments are centralized and managed by the company that created them
03:01For example, Tether transactions are managed by the Tether platform, while Bitcoin payments are processed by a vast decentralized network of
03:07People called miners, who are spread out all over the world, it's instantaneous, there's no settlement process that needs to occur
03:17Only a handful of e-commerce websites accept stable coins at the moment, but crypto traders have quickly adopted stable coins like Tether to buy and sell cryptocurrencies online
03:28That's because stable coins don't run on normal banking hours, compared to stocks that have to be traded in locations like New York or Hong Kong during specific hours, cryptocurrencies are traded 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all across the globe
03:41Plus, academics who study the role of Cryptocurrencies say some banks have been wary to interact with crypto exchanges due to the lack of oversight in the industry, and concerns that they could be exposed to illicit activities like laundering money or funding terrorism
03:57Finance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, said it is committed to creating a compliance safe and reliable trading environment, and it asks users to follow all local laws on money laundering and counter terrorism financing
04:13In 2019, the New York Attorney General accused the companies managing the stablecoin Tether, also called USDT, of making False statements to investors about the cash reserves of its currency, an essential component of what makes it stable and secure for investors
04:30The crypto community online discussed the probe and Tether's dollar backing
04:35If you go to their website, right here, it says, "Every Tether is always 100% backed by our reserves," which sounds very much as if one US dollar went in and a Tether was printed in return
04:44It's so simple
04:47The investigation found that in 2017 and 2018, Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange that is common ownership with the company that controls Tether, relied on a third-party company named Crypto Capital Corporation to handle deposits and withdrawals on Bitfinex's trading platform
05:05The New York Attorney General's office said that Crypto Capital Corporation failed to process some of these orders, and Bitfinex lost access to 850 million dollars of its customers' money
05:18Crypto Capital said it couldn't process Bitfinex transactions because, in 2018, its bank accounts in the US, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom were frozen without justification
05:30Naturally, this significantly delayed fiat withdrawals from Bitfinex for its users, which started to suspect something was up
05:36New York Attorney General's office said Beat Fenex tapped into Tether's dollar reserves to cover up the losses, and afterwards lied to its customers when it said its currency was fully backed by U.S
05:46dollars at all times
05:48During the course of the New York Attorney General's investigation, Tether said it held 74% of the necessary reserves, which some investors considered to be enough to make the digital currency secure
06:01This is perfectly common in modern banking, in which only a fraction of bank deposits are backed by actual cash on hand, as part of a settlement with the New York Attorney General's office
06:08Bitfinex and Tether limited paid 18.5 million dollars in penalties and stopped trading activity with New Yorkers
06:14This is finally coming to an end
06:21Bitfinex and Tether said the amount of money they agreed to pay should be viewed as a measure of their desire to put the matter behind them
06:28The firms did not admit or deny any wrongdoing
06:32Industry insiders say this investigation should be a warning to all companies that created stablecoins, and to expect the stablecoin industry to be more tightly regulated in the coming years, some companies already looking towards a future of using reliable virtual
06:45Money as payments
06:49Visa announced a stablecoin-based credit card and said that making its digital currency strategy secure, private, and trusted is a key priority
06:57Facebook's new cryptocurrency project, DM, aims to create stablecoins pegged to different fiat currencies
07:03DM says the system is being built with security in mind
07:07Some countries are also working on what financial analysts call the next iteration of stablecoins, which would be a digital currency pegged to the national currency and controlled by central banks
07:16But before this type of digital money truly goes mainstream, Kern says its Creators and issuers are going to have to convince regulators and users that their technology will keep their money safe
07:29It's going to be very important for people to trust the entity that's issuing the stable coin, and the one that has the most trust of people over a period of time will be the one that becomes the most heavily used, you.