Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle, stated that the stablecoin issuer has been “able to access” its $3.3 billion in funds that were stored at the defunct bank Silicon Valley Bank as of March 13th (SVB).
Allaire expressed his belief to Bloomberg Markets on March 14 and stated that he thought “if not everything, very close to everything was able to clear” from the insolvent lender.
Following the announcement that $3.3 billion worth of its financial assets were frozen on SVB, the stablecoin known as USD Coin, which was produced by Circle, had a momentary de-peg.
Since then, the dollar peg of the stablecoin has been restored; however, according to TradingView, widespread redemptions of USDC have caused the market cap of the stablecoin to decrease by roughly 10% since March 11. In the meantime, during the same timeframe, USDC peer Tether (USDT) has reported a minor growth in its market cap since March 11, jumping by over 1% to $73.03 billion. This brings the total market worth for both of these currencies to around the same level.
Given that the $3.3 billion represented less than 8% of the token’s reserves according to its January reserve report which was posted on March 2, the temporarily locked funds had a major impact on USDC.
The report stated that USDC was over 100% collateralized, with over 80% of the reserve consisting of short-dated United States Treasury Bills. These are highly liquid assets that are direct obligations of the United States government and are widely regarded as one of the safest investments on a global scale.
