Looking at USDT and USDC is interesting. USDT is dropping, USDC is increasing. Perhaps this is one large seller dropping the market, and he is exiting through Tether.
You scared me! Talking about market cap, not spot price? (Your graphics aren’t loading properly for some reason, but I infer from other replies. For future readers, USDT is still firmly pegged from where I sit.)
I hate USDC. I hate it with fire. Circle is evil (and don’t forget, they were S2Xers, etc.).
I said in some earlier post (no time to search when not handy), I call USDC a Trojan Horse
de facto CBDC by the back door.
USDC has been massively promoted with the rise of defi. Most folks here do not have the vantage point to see it. I have seen USDC growing like a tumour, eating up Tether’s market. Tether is only dominant on Ethereum, and some centralized exchanges/big traders (especially Asian). Everywhere else nowadays in defi-land, USDC is already dominant. On some newer defi chains, USDT doesn’t even exist; it is USDC or nothing.
Anyway... (A) is proceeding apace. (B), I hope will not happen. (C) is largely done, but still ongoing. (I should modify what I said in another recent post: I think the reason some alts seem now to be falling less than BTC is that they are already almost burnt to the ground. From my perspective, altcoin markets have been breathing an extended dying gasp for the past month.)
A. Bull traps. Destroying long-term confidence in BTC needs not one big crash, but a series of fake recoveries followed by worse crashes, false hopes, broken dreams. This is psychological warfare as much as economic warfare. We now have memes about "Slaying of a Bearwhale", Honey Badger - a common belief that BTC always recovers and goes up. Evil Hat wants to replace that with a popular belief that "what goes up, must come down".
[...]
B. Knock Tether off its peg. [...]
C. Systematically annihilate the altcoin markets. A few thoughtless types of Bitcoiners would cheer for this. They would not pause to contemplate [...]
Coinbase is a member of the world economic forum. That could explain your USDC -> CBDC theory.