Newscasts - Crypto Weekly: from stablecoins to Syria

Etsy

12/06/2025 11:04

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Source: 'Reuters - Business videos'

Description: French bank Societe Generale is to become the first major European lender to launch a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, while Binance is opening up its business to Syria. Ciara Lee reports on the crypto stories making the headlines this week.

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Video Transcript:

From SocGen's stablecoin to why Binance is opening up to Syria, this is Crypto Weekly. French bank Societe Generale is to become the first major European lender to launch a dollar-pegged stablecoin. It will launch via its crypto subsidiary SG-FORGE, named "USD CoinVertible," it will exist on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. And is expected to be publicly tradable from July. Two men pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges they kidnapped a man for three weeks in Manhattan's upscale SoHo neighborhood. They're accused of shocking him with electric wires and dangling him over a staircase to try to get him to give up his Bitcoin password. John Woeltz and William Duplessie both face up to life in prison if convicted. With Bitcoin on the march and crypto IPOs hotting up, what's the story with meme coins? This week Reuters spoke with John D'agostino who is head of institutional strategy at Coinbase.

I think of them as digital collectibles and if people want to engage in the collecting of collectibles, more power to them. And there's a very, very low cost of entry to doing that. Think of it like Etsy, but instead of having to like create the thing, you could magically create it in 10 seconds with almost no money. Think about what Etsy would turn into like a billion projects, right? If you didn't need it, if it was easy to crochet, right, if and it was free, almost free to crochet, everyone would be posting things to Etsy.

But are meme coins a good investment?

I like to fish, and I don't catch anything. So, you can make an argument that the money I spend on fishing is completely wasted and nonsensical. So, I try not to judge people. People want to buy something because they believe it helps them belong to a community. I try to not be judgmental of that. Everybody has different ways of spending their disposable income.

Binance will allow users in Syria to trade in cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin on the platform. It follows a US decision to lift sanctions on the country last month. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said that Syrians will be granted full access to its offerings which include more than 300 cryptocurrency tokens and stablecoins.