Silicon Valley Bank's collapse highlights fickleness of crypto money

business-standard.com:

When the world’s second-largest stablecoin got caught up in the collapse of a California bank late last week, it reprised the now-famous maxim of Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore. “Evil,” the economists had claimed in a 2001 lecture, later made available as a paper of the same title, “is the root of all money.”

Turning a popular aphorism on its head was a ploy by the professors to enliven a technical discussion. “Evil is a strong word,” they wrote. “You may find the moral category too severe for something as mild as breaking a promise. In which case, you may want to change the title to ‘Distrust Is the Root of All Money.’ But that wouldn’t have quite the same ring.”

Events last week showed that Kiyotaki-Moore may have been right, not just in their analysis but also in their hyperbole: People accept and hold money not because it circulates freely and is widely used to store value, but because it helps the society overcome the scourge of broken promises. For something to aspire to money-ness, it must be free of even the slightest doubt in that regard.

That was clearly not the case with Circle Internet Financial Ltd.’s USD Coin, or USDC, the No. 2 dollar clone behind Tether. News that around 8% of the crypto firm’s reserves were on deposit at Silicon Valley Bank, which was closed down by regulators Friday, sent the price of the stablecoin sharply below $1, falling to less than 85 cents before recovering. In the language of money-market funds — the older, more conventional cousins of blockchain-based stablecoins — USDC broke the buck. Circle may still keep its promise of redeeming all its coins 1:1 for dollar. But a small doubt that it may not be able to do so arose. Even if briefly, USDC has lost its claim of being money.