First Mover Americas: Hedera’s Token Gains on Fed Move

Hedera Hashgraph’s HBAR token took the lead among major cryptocurrencies on Monday with a gain of 15% over the last 24 hours, after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s FedNow added a Hedera Hashgraph-based micropayments platform, Dropp, as a service provider. FedNow is an instant payment service provider developed by the Fed for depository institutions in the U.S. Hedera is a public distributed ledger based on a Hashgraph algorithm that the company says allows users to process transactions quickly and cheaply. Bitcoin and ethereum were trading flat on Monday after trading in a tight range over the weekend.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been sent back to jail ahead of his October trial on seven federal criminal charges after a federal judge revoked his release on bond Friday afternoon, saying the former crypto heavyweight appears to have tried to tamper with witnesses. Bankman-Fried is willing “to risk crossing the line in an effort to get right up to [the line], wherever it is,” said U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said they will appeal the decision and asked that Bankman-Fried remain free until the appeal is heard. The judge rejected that motion.

Bank of America wrote in a research report last week that PayPal’s (PYPL) new stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), won’t likely to be adopted widely anytime soon and longer term will face more competition from other branded stablecoins. “Investors may have been fine holding non-yield bearing stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), when rates were close to zero, but yield-bearing stablecoins will likely become increasingly available and attractive with short-terms rates above 5%,” analysts Alkesh Shah and Andrew Moss wrote.