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Why the ECB Is Getting in on the Stablecoin Game

Discussing the ECB's recent stablecoin comments, the resurfacing of some prominent 2017 token projects and a debate: Is crypto for criminals?

Updated Sep 13, 2021, 11:49 a.m. Published Dec 13, 2019, 8:00 p.m.
Breakdown v4

Welcome to The Breakdown with Nathaniel Whittemore. Starting off this episode we discuss European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde’s comments on stablecoins that inflamed Crypto Twitter yesterday. She said projects in the space indicated clear demand even as she gave bitcoin a bit of a backhanded compliment.

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Meanwhile, two hugely hyped projects – Orchid and Filecoin – have both resurfaced. What might this mean for the token narrative going into 2020? We'll explore what the growth of these tokens means for the market in general.

Lastly, in her end-of-year piece for CoinDesk, Jill Carlson triggered an avalanche of commentary by arguing that crypto isn’t supposed to be mainstream because its primary use case is for censored transactions. We'll go deep on that subject on today's podcast.

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What to know:

  • As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
  • GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
  • Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.

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U.S. Congress (Jesse Hamilton/CoinDesk)

Congress continues to make progress on crypto issues but things are moving slowly.