New $1 billion USDC decision from Binance

Binance exchange continues its steps to return to USDC issued by Circle company. While the exchange has recently started to list many crypto transaction pairs in USDC parity, today it announced that it has converted the entire SAFU fund to USDC.

The fund called SAFU, created in 2018, was created to cover users’ losses in the event of a possible hacking incident.

When you say BUSD, USDT, TUSD, FDUSD…

As it is known, the US-based Coinbase exchange, which has a partnership with Circle, is one of Binance’s biggest competitors. While Coinbase exchange was one of the biggest supporters of USDC, Binance supported TUSD for a period after BUSD and tried to encourage users to trade with this stablecoin. Binance, which still has reservations about USDT, has recently been supporting the Hong Kong-based stablecoin FDUSD.

back to USDC

However, the stock market seems to have started to move in the opposite direction of the USDC move in September 2022. Binance announced at that time that it would completely remove USDC from the exchange and delist crypto trading pairs over time. However, the suspension of the new issuance of BUSD in the USA and the failure of TUSD and USDT to receive the expected support turned the platform back to USDC, which is supported by its competitors.

In the statement, it was stated that this step was taken to ensure that the SAFU fund remained at a value of 1 billion dollars, and it was stated that “Using a reliable, audited and transparent stablecoin for SAFU will ensure that everyone’s trust is gained.”

The SAFU fund previously included assets such as Bitcoin and BNB. The biggest reason for the stock market’s move was that the volatility in cryptocurrencies caused the value of the fund to decrease. With this step, the fund will remain worth at least $1 billion.

USDT still biggest, USDC rebounds

As it is known, USDT, issued by the Tether company, is by far the largest fixed coin at the moment. Circle company and USDC, which suffered a great loss of value and trust in the banking crisis in March in the USA last year, seem to have regained this trust in the intervening year. While the market value of USDT is approaching 110 billion dollars, this figure is only 32 billion dollars for USDC.

Binance’s choice of USDC instead of USDT seems to be very controversial.