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Borrowing dollar-pegged stablecoins such as tether USDT$0.9997 and USD Coin (USDC) from heavyweight decentralized lending platform Aave now costs 5% or less in annualized interest. That’s much lower than the 13%–14% seen last month following the KelpDAO hack.
The aftermath of the exploit saw whales pull out millions worth of coins, including stablecoins, from Aave, leading to borrowing pools running short of liquidity. This forced some traders to resort to borrowing stablecoins against their own locked stablecoin deposits. The net result was a surge in borrowing rates that could have easily spilled over into the wider market.
Normalization occurred after Aave governance suggested measures to improve stablecoin liquidity and ecosystem participants raised more than $160 million in relief funding.
“The crisis has resolved, and Aave V3 USDC has now normalized to around 3.86%. Morpho’s curated vaults sit in a 3.5% to 5.4% range, while Sky’s USDS savings rate is around 3.65%,” said Adam Haeems, head of asset management at Tesseract Group. Tesseract has $500 million in assets under management.
He added that the stablecoin rate cycle, from spike to fix to normalization, ran entirely independent of where bitcoin trades, with no spillover effects. “That is the more useful story for institutional allocators,” he noted.
Speaking of BTC, it topped $82,000 early today as oil prices crashed 6% and Nasdaq futures rallied on reports that Iran and the U.S. are nearing an agreement to end the conflict that has disrupted oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, triggering gas price surges in the U.S. and petrol spikes in Asia.
Some analysts are now closely watching the 200-day SMA at $83,800.
“The leading cryptocurrency is approaching its 200-day moving average; a firm consolidation above this level would be a further sign of bullish dominance. We saw the first such signal—consolidation above the 50-day moving average—exactly one month ago. It is quite likely that, as Bitcoin approaches $83K, a short-term profit-taking phase may emerge, allowing some gains to be realized,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, Chief Market Analyst at FxPro, in an email.
At Consensus Miami, industry participants said the line between crypto derivatives and traditional markets has effectively dissolved. In the coming years, offshore crypto exchanges could see more activity in equity perpetuals than in crypto-native contracts.
In traditional markets, the dollar index, which is inversely correlated with bitcoin’s price, has fallen back below 98.00, nearing Friday’s low of 97.72. Meanwhile, risk proxies such as the Australian dollar are trading at their highest levels against the U.S. dollar since 2022. Talk about risk-on sentiment – stay alert!
Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”
Global bonds rally as oil falls on mounting hopes for peace deal (Bloomberg): Global bonds rallied as speculation about a potential peace deal between the U.S. and Iran drove down energy prices, curbing bets on interest rate hikes as inflation expectations eased.
Gasoline costs 50% more in the US than it did before the Iran war (AP): The price of a gallon of regular gasoline climbed 31 cents in the past week, spiking to an average of $4.48 per gallon, hitting the wallets of drivers after rising 50% since the war with Iran began.
ZEC’s price has surged to its highest since late 2025. (CoinDesk)
The chart shows daily price swings for privacy-focused zcash (ZEC) in candlestick format since August 2025.
ZEC’s price has moved above the late December high of $556.59. A breakout would be confirmed if today’s candle closes (UTC) above that resistance, opening the door for a move toward the 2025 peak of above $700.
