Sam Beckman-Fried accuses Binance of «stablecoin war»

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, said that the growth of the stablecoin of the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance could trigger a «second major stablecoin war» — given how quickly the market capitalization of BUSD has grown in recent months. According to the cryptocurrency data aggregator Coin Metrics, the share of BUSD in the global stablecoin market has increased from 10.01% on September 7 to 15.48% as of October 22.

Commenting on the asset’s growth, FTX CEO said on Twitter: «Binance converts USDC to BUSD and we see a supply shift … -so begins the second great stablecoin war».

1) Binance converts USDC -→ BUSD, and we see the change in supplies.

Thus begins the Second Great Stablecoin War. (The first one, fought in ~2018, ended with USDC and USDT edging out TUSD/GUSD/USDP.) https://t.co/X2VLOBOTev

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) October 23, 2022

Bankman-Fried emphasized that the first «stablecoin war» was fought back in 2018, when USDT and USDC became the two leaders. Today, USDT still has many advantages over other stablecoins, with a market share of 48%. To be fair, it was 88% in 2020. As for USDC, the asset grew from 10% to 32% over the same reporting period.

The growth of Binance’s stablecoin is even more noticeable for market players — the market capitalization of BUSD jumped from 0.5% to 15.48% over the same period.

As a reminder, on September 29, the Binance cryptocurrency exchange stopped supporting competitive stablecoins, including USDC. The exchange stopped supporting currency pairs such as USDC/BUSD, USDC/USDT, USDP/BUSD, and automatically converts any user balances to BUSD. Binance representatives noted that in the future, they may change the list of stablecoins subject to automatic conversion.