Over the weekend, a wallet with the name Vitalik Buterin paid 500 ether, or just over $700,000, to create the less well-known RAI stablecoin, and then used the money to buy USD Coin (USDC), which was trading below its $1 peg.
Seven years ago, the vitalik.eth wallet was made, and as of Tuesday, it contained more than 5,360 ether. Even while Ethereum Names Service (ENS) domains point to cryptocurrency wallets, the owners may not always be the people most closely linked with the name.
Blockchain analytics company PeckShield said on Sunday that a “Vitalik-labeled address” had deposited 500 $ETH in Reflexer to generate 150k $RAI and exchanged 132.5k $RAI for 378.5k $USDC. In the past three hours, they also changed 17.5k $RAI for 50k $DAI.
In a previous blog post, Buterin acknowledged the distinctive stablecoin mechanism of RAI. The Reflexer Finance-issued RAI is not tethered to any fiat currency and is instead supported by ether, unlike the majority of other stablecoins. As of Tuesday, you can exchange one RAI for 2.7 dollars’ worth of ether.
Following Friday’s failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which led to a decline in cryptocurrency prices overall, USDC depegged during the weekend. Businesses impacted included stablecoin issuer Circle, based in the United States, which as of January 17 kept some of the reserves for its USDC stablecoin at Silicon Valley Bank. On Monday night, USDC restored its peg to, providing bargain USDC buyers a 10% gain in just over 48 hours.
