The US Federal Reserve raised rates by 75 basis points yesterday in response to inflation concerns – the largest single increase since 1994.
Bitcoin rallied rapidly on the news, however has erased yesterday's gains overnight. Analysts believe the news was already price in due to a leak days before the meeting.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has previously ruled out the possibility of a 75 basis point rate increase in May, however Consumer Price Index figures for the month ended up changing that decision – as year-over-year inflation came in at 8.6%.
Circle Internet Financial, the issuers of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin, have announced that it will be issuing a brand new, euro-backed stablecoin called Euro Coin (EUROC).
Euro Coin will be built and issued using the same full-reserve model used for USDC, beginning with the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-20 token. Support for additional chains is expected later within the year.
A research report by IT engineer and cryptographer, Michel Khazzaka, has shown that Bitcoin uses 56 times less energy than the legacy financial system.
The report used four years of research and proposed a new method of estimating Bitcoin's energy consumption from its Proof-of-Work mining algorithm – an improvement over the estimates calculated by Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI).
