Good morning, this is Phillip from Blockchain Century on March the 20th. In the news today Bitcoins price has slipped from last week's high by 17%. For context, in every previous Bitcoin bull run we've had five or even 6 retraces of 20 plus percent and the average was probably around 35% with one exception was the 55% drawdown in just post the COVID lockdown in 2020. This only lasted 2 weeks before Bitcoin went on a 1500% upwards bull run.
Also in the news today is Coinbase is teaming up with a small coffee chain in Washington called Compass Coffee, and they're offering free transactions using the stable coin USDC, which obviously saves Compass Coffee the transaction fees using traditional payment methods. This sounds like an insignificant development, but it's very interesting and we'll keep a close eye on developments. USDC is a stable coin meaning it is pegged to the US dollar and was created by Circle. It is an Ethereum ERC 20 token and has an interesting history, having been on Solana and more recently on the Tron network. It also temporarily lost its peg during the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank last year. Obviously there is much talk around a US CBDC (central bank digital currency) and what that might look like and USDC has cropped up in various conversations. For clarity, I don't think in the long run USDC will play any part in such a project for a variety of reasons, as much work needs to be done to make such a CBDC quantum resistant and so on. But this is a topic we'll cover in more depth soon. But this certainly shows how Circle, Coinbase and USDC have met with the approval of financial regulators and authorities for the time being at least.
And finally, today we have the Federal Reserve meeting later our time GMT to announce interest rates. Currently we sit at 5.5%, the forecast is 5.5%. So we shall. Thanks for listening here at Blockchain Century and please remember to subscribe at blockchaincentury.com
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