Circle, the issuer of the second-largest stablecoin, USDC, and Stripe, an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) provider, have both announced plans to build their own Layer-1 blockchain protocols, seemingly ditching the largest smart contracts protocol, Ethereum (ETH).
The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) segment is regaining popularity driven by a surge in Total Value Locked (TVL) and an increasing user base, as investors' growing risk appetite fuels a capital rotation from Bitcoin (BTC) to Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and other top layer-1 cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum (ETH) price trades in red below $3,700 at the time of writing on Friday, closing below its key support level the previous week.