In Switzerland, a proposal has been made to change the constitution to allow the national bank there to hold Bitcoin, and in South Korea they want to bolster weak financial markets with cryptocurrency ETFs. What else has happened in the last week?
Swiss National Bank may soon hold Bitcoin
On the last day of 2024, the Swiss Federal Chancellery submitted a proposal for the Swiss National Bank, the equivalent of the Czech National Bank conducting monetary policy, to hold $BTC for constitutional enshrinement.
A condition of the proposal is that it must get 100,000 signatures from Switzerland's nearly 9 million residents. After that, the proposal can only move to the next stage, which is a vote in a public referendum.
Prominent names from the cryptocurrency community are behind the proposal, namely Giw Zanganeh, vice president of mining and energy at Tether, and Yves Bennaïm, founder of the Swiss non-profit think tank 2B4CH.
It was the 2B4CH organisation that prepared the documents that helped the Chancellery with the Bitcoin proposal. Interestingly, the first application to the Chancellery was supposed to take place in October 2021, but was eventually postponed due to lack of interest.
We have been waiting for the right timing. Now everything is as it should be and that's why we have submitted the documents and will start collecting signatures," said Bennaï.
The proposal is titled Financially Sound, Sovereign and Responsible Switzerland and seeks to amend Article 99(3) of the Swiss federal constitution to make a new reference to Bitcoin.
The National Bank shall create sufficient monetary reserves from its own revenues; part of these reserves are gold and Bitcoin, the proposal says.
In order to move to a public referendum, the proposal must now gather 100,000 signatures by June 30, 2026, which is about a year and a half away.
At the same time, the most prominent country considering investing in Bitcoin is the United States. However, they would take a different route to this step, and that is through a purchase by the Treasury Department, which would hold Bitcoin.
A Bitcoin reserve bill is also being discussed and has the support of Senator Cynthia Lummis. Politicians in Brazil and Poland are also toying with a similar idea.
$1 billion worth of stablecoins added to Solana
$SOL raised $1 billion in stablecoins during December, with the addition primarily driven by USDC, illustrating the growing popularity of stablecoins and Solana's role in DeFi.
Thus, Solana had a total of over $5 billion locked up in these tokens at the end of December, with $4 billion made up of USDC and the second dominant stablecoin being Tether (USDT).
This means that over $5 billion in stablecoins are being used on Solana for operations within decentralized finance and applications.
In terms of market capitalization, that of stablecoins grew rapidly after the US presidential election, when Donald Trump won, supporting the cryptocurrency industry.
The largest stablecoin by market capitalization, USDT, has over $137 billion in deposits, while USDC has $46 billion.
Since the November election, the market capitalization of the top three stablecoins, USDT, USDC and Dai, has increased by $25 billion, a bullish signal for DeFi in particular, where stablecoins play a key role.
Solana thus continues to be a major challenger to Ethereum in the field of decentralized finance and other use cases within smart contracts.
Although the total value of funds locked up on Solana has grown 5x to $8.6 billion in 2024, there is still over $110 billion locked up on Ethereum in stablecoins alone.
Cryptocurrency ETFs to revive capital markets in South Korea
South Korea saw the initial opening of its securities and derivatives markets in the new year on January 2, where the chairman of the South Korean exchange, Eun-Bo Jeong, summarized the past year and outlined the strategy for the future.
Commenting on the past year, he mentioned the economic hurdles facing the country, pointing to factors such as a declining domestic economy, reduced exports and geopolitical tensions.
He stressed the need for innovative financial products to revive domestic capital markets and hinted at interest in flooding cryptocurrency exchange traded funds (ETFs) this year in line with global demand for such products.
However, Ki Young Ju, CEO of CryptoQuant, does not share such a positive view on the approval of cryptocurrency ETFs.
He says the view of digital assets at the local regulator is similar to that of the SEC under Gary Gensler, who has been a strong opponent of the listing of spot ETFs for Bitcoin or $ETH .
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