First Mover: After Falling 65% This Year in Bitcoin Terms, Do 'Stablecoins' Need a Rebranding?

Imagine a future where bitcoin has taken over from the U.S. dollar as the world's de facto reserve currency.

Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more.

In the taxonomy of digital assets, stablecoins are a category of tokens whose value is linked to dollars or other major currencies or assets.

The idea is that their prices are more stable than those of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Such a rebranding could gain traction as dollar-linked stablecoins grow in popularity - even though they've been a pretty lousy investment option in recent months compared with bitcoin.

As detailed in First Mover last week, every digital asset in the CoinDesk 20 gained in July except for dollar-linked stablecoins, whose prices were, by definition, unchanged in dollar terms.

"We may very well end up hearing calls for 'Stablecoins not bitcoin' in the same way we heard 'Blockchain not bitcoin' a few years ago."

Such an outlook assumes people continue to want stability in dollar terms.

Which means those crypto-dollars are down 65% this year, in bitcoin terms.

Bitcoin generally rallied in tandem with gold in the second half of July.Disclosure.