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Tether launches its USDT stablecoin on the Polygon network

Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin company, has launched its USDT stablecoin on the Polygon network bringing its utility to the over 19,000 decentralized applications (dApps) running on Polygon.

Polygon, a layer 2 (L2) scaling solution for the Ethereum network, allows cheaper and faster transaction costs using ZK rollups and optimistic rollups technologies. Its dapps have been created by more than 8k developer teams from 3k in October.

Tether has a variety of tokens backed by assets with a more “stable” value like the commercial paper and US treasury bills. These assets keep Tether tokens pegged to one dollar each. Besides, Tether had recently announced a new stablecoin, MXNT, launch that will be pegged on Mexican Peso.

Advantages of stable assets

Stable assets are very important as they help to increase the rate of trade in the market as well as cubbing all the risks involved in the DeFi ecosystem in terms of market volatility.

Polygon is now the 11th blockchain to host USDT. Other blockchains that host USDT are; Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, Omni, Kusama, Algorand, EOS, Bitcoin Cash’s Standard Ledger Protocol, and Tron.

Paolo Ardoino, Tether CTO said:

“We’re excited to launch USD₮ on Polygon, offering its community access to the most liquid, stable, and trusted stablecoin in the digital token space.” 

Notably, USDT had faced some turbulence after TerraUSD (UST) collapsed. This could not be dealt with since UST was an algorithmic stablecoin that was backed by unstable crypto instead of direct dollars.

However, Tether’s recovered its peg quickly and reassured its holders that their reserves were fully backed.

The post Tether launches its USDT stablecoin on the Polygon network appeared first on CoinJournal.

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STEPN (GMT) price surges 20% a day after STEPN said it’ll block GPS services in China

STEPN, the most popular fitness-focused Move-to-earn game, shared an official announcement stating that they will block geolocation (GPS) services for users in China mainland starting on July 15.

Following the announcement, the price of STEPN (GMT) dropped by 5.29% to a low of about $0.83 before bouncing back by 20.67% to trade at $1.05 at the time of writing.

What is STEPN?

After its launch in late 2021, STEPN gained popularity in the world gaining over $20M profit in Q1 of 2022. Currently, the game has over 580K global players, however, it’s not clear how many players are in China.

Since the company will be blocking all the China-based IP addresses, local users have been given up to July 15 to make arrangements themselves for their virtual assets before the change becomes effective. 

STEPN uses the GPS concept to track the movement and steps of the players who purchased the virtual NFT sneakers. The virtual NFT sneakers are then converted to in-game utility tokens.

What caused STEPN to block GPS services in mainland China?

The move to block GPS services in mainland China is mainly due to regulatory issues.

Although STEPN did not explain the reason why the team decided to take that stand, their Twitter thread has hinted at regulatory policies compliance.

The post noted:

“STEPN has always attached great importance to compliance obligations and always strictly abides by the relevant requirements of local regulatory agencies. We also remind users to beware of scams.”

However, the Chinese government is known for its strict policies against digital recording technologies it has not provided and also the fear of foreign surveillance.

Last year, the Chinese government banned the use of Tesla cars by its state officials due to their facial recognition cameras saying that they can be used to spy and gather state information.

Earlier this year, China’s general prosecutor added the level of inspecting non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the Metaverse. Besides, the officials in the country have been warned against financial crimes like illegal fundraising and money laundering carried out through the Metaverse and NFTs. Related crimes will not be tolerated and will attract severe punishment

The post STEPN (GMT) price surges 20% a day after STEPN said it’ll block GPS services in China appeared first on CoinJournal.