Tether Scores Second-Lowest Rank in S&P Global Stablecoin Stability Assessment

CoinDeskPolicyPublicado a 2023-12-12Actualizado a 2023-12-13

Resumen

USDT was assigned a low score of four, meaning the largest stablecoin is constrained in its ability to maintain its peg to fiat.

S&P Global has started assessing a stablecoin's ability to hold its peg.
Tether was assigned a score of 4, the second-lowest.

7.9K

Ratings company S&P Global introduced a stablecoin stability assessment on Tuesday, assigning scores from 1 (very strong) to 5 (weak) as a measure of how capable the cryptocurrency is at keeping to its fiat-currency peg.

None of the eight stablecoins assessed warranted a 1. Three – Gemini dollar (GUSD), USD Coin (USDC) and Pax Dollar (USDP) – scored 2 and Tether (USDT), the largest stablecoin by market cap, was assigned 4 (constrained). The lowest rank was assigned to TrueUSD (TUSD) and Frax (FRAX).

Stablecoins are often digital assets backed by real-world assets like the U.S. dollar and are meant to hold their value against those assets. Some, however, are not physically backed, and attempt to use mathematical algorithms to maintain their value. S&P's assessment considered quality risks, including credit, market value and custody risks as well as liquidation and overcollateralization among other criteria.

"As we look to the future, we see stablecoins becoming further embedded into the fabric of financial markets, acting as an important bridge between digital and real-world assets," Lapo Guadagnuolo, a senior analyst at S&P Global Ratings said in a statement. "Nonetheless, it's important to acknowledge that stablecoins are not immune to factors such as asset quality, governance, and liquidity."

USDT is the third-biggest crypto after bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), with a market capitalization of over $90 billion, according to CoinGecko. Last November, as concerns circulated over the ability of crypto exchange FTX to continue functioning, it dropped 3% below its peg. The company attributed the drop to market volatility.

Last month, the Bank for International Settlements – the global organization of central banks – said that most stablecoins have not managed to stay stable. To serve as a medium of exchange, stability is essential, the bank said.

The BIS cited concerns over "transparency regarding the availability and quality of these reserves," an issue echoed by S&P.

Feedback from participants in decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi) show "the market has little transparency or insight into the inherent risks of the different stablecoins," S&P said.

Tether had not responded to a request for comment by publication time.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW

Recommended for you:

UPDATE (Dec. 13, 16:05 UTC): Changes lead photo

Edited by Sheldon Reback.

Lecturas Relacionadas

US Large Models Moving Towards Closure, In the Name of Security

Summary: The U.S. government has intervened to regulate the release of advanced AI models, citing national security concerns. This analysis details the events surrounding the controlled rollout of Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models and OpenAI's restricted GPT-5.6 release, following a Trump administration executive order. It questions the technical basis for the government's actions, noting that internal company safety assessments did not deem the models an unacceptable risk. The article draws parallels to the 1990s "Crypto Wars," where similar attempts to control encryption technology ultimately failed, harming U.S. competitiveness. Experts warn that opaque, non-technical regulatory processes could stifle innovation, concentrate power, and undermine the economic logic of the AI industry, especially as Chinese models embrace open-source development. The piece concludes that this marks a potential turning point toward a pre-approval era for U.S. AI, creating uncertainty for developers and potentially slowing the broad societal diffusion essential for a technology's success.

链捕手Hace 17 min(s)

US Large Models Moving Towards Closure, In the Name of Security

链捕手Hace 17 min(s)

Maple Finance rallies 20% after Kraken partnership – Will SYRUP’s rise continue?

Maple Finance's native token SYRUP surged roughly 20% following a partnership announcement with crypto exchange Kraken to provide on-chain, asset-backed financing. This development, coupled with a broader market recovery, fueled significant trading volume, particularly from U.S. investors. The protocol's fundamentals strengthened, with its Total Value Locked (TVL) increasing by $201 million to around $2.05 billion and Q2 gross revenue reaching $24.16 million. An ongoing token buyback program and rising Open Interest in perpetual markets, alongside a positive but modest Funding Rate, indicate sustained bullish sentiment. The overall outlook remains positive, suggesting potential for further short-term gains for SYRUP.

ambcryptoHace 1 hora(s)

Maple Finance rallies 20% after Kraken partnership – Will SYRUP’s rise continue?

ambcryptoHace 1 hora(s)

Ethereum down 45% YTD – So why do SharpLink and whales keep buying?

Despite Ethereum (ETH) being down 20-45% year-to-date amid broader crypto weakness, institutional and whale buying activity suggests growing long-term conviction. SharpLink, after an eight-month pause, purchased 5,000 ETH and later added $45.54 million in LSETH, increasing its total holdings significantly despite substantial unrealized losses. Similarly, a new whale wallet accumulated over 18,000 ETH worth $28.9 million in nine days, indicating strategic positioning for future price movements rather than short-term trading. However, this accumulation contrasts with spot Ethereum ETFs, which saw net outflows of $12.85 million recently, highlighting a divergence between direct treasury/whale buyers and ETF investors. While the persistent buying from these large holders may gradually ease selling pressure, a sustained recovery for Ethereum still depends on a reversal in ETF flows and a broader improvement in network demand and market sentiment.

ambcryptoHace 5 hora(s)

Ethereum down 45% YTD – So why do SharpLink and whales keep buying?

ambcryptoHace 5 hora(s)

Just now, DeepSeek V4 updates with DSpark, improving inference speed by 80%

DeepSeek has updated its DeepSeek V4 model with the DSpark speculative decoding framework, achieving a significant 60-85% speedup in generation for Flash models and 57-78% for Pro models while maintaining the same overall throughput. This engineering-focused update, rather than a core architectural change, introduces DSpark to address latency and throughput bottlenecks in high-concurrency production environments. DSpark combines high-throughput parallel generation with adaptive load-aware verification. Its key innovations include a semi-autoregressive generation architecture to model dependencies within token blocks and a hardware-aware confidence-scheduled verification system. This system uses a confidence head to predict token acceptance probabilities, allowing it to dynamically optimize verification length per request and allocate compute only to tokens with the highest expected payoff. The asynchronous scheduler is designed for real-world deployment, ensuring zero-overhead scheduling and continuous CUDA graph replay while preserving the target model's output distribution. In tests across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and daily dialogue, DSpark outperformed state-of-the-art models like Eagle3 and DFlash, increasing average acceptance length by 26.7%-30.9% and 16.3%-18.4% respectively on Qwen3 target models. DeepSeek also open-sourced DeepSpec, a full-stack codebase for training and evaluating speculative decoding draft models, providing a standardized toolkit that includes data preparation tools, model implementations, training code, and evaluation scripts.

marsbitHace 6 hora(s)

Just now, DeepSeek V4 updates with DSpark, improving inference speed by 80%

marsbitHace 6 hora(s)

Can Aavenomics 3.0 sustain AAVE’s recovery rally amid Kraken buyout talks?

Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov has dismissed reports of a potential stake sale to Kraken, clarifying that Aave would not sell at a significant discount. He highlighted Aave's substantial annualized revenue and its focus on a broad financial market. Kulechov also announced plans for Aavenomics 3.0, featuring a new automated buyback mechanism. Following these updates, the AAVE token price surged 12%, extending its June recovery rally to over 50% from its recent lows. The rally is partly attributed to reduced selling pressure and positive sentiment from the announced tokenomics plan, despite the token remaining significantly below its all-time high.

ambcryptoHace 7 hora(s)

Can Aavenomics 3.0 sustain AAVE’s recovery rally amid Kraken buyout talks?

ambcryptoHace 7 hora(s)

Trading

Spot