Crypto’s Waiting Room Is Emptying: Clients Go to Cash

Institutional clients at Australian crypto firm Zerocap sold USDT for US dollars and kept the cash during a risk-off week, barely touching Bitcoin or Ether in the process.

Cash, not coins

Zerocap is a Melbourne-based digital asset firm that provides trading, liquidity and custody to institutions and wholesale investors, and is registered with Australia’s financial intelligence agency, AUSTRAC, as a digital currency exchange. Its OTC trader Oliver Davis wrote that USDT saw “another pronounced off-ramping week as risk appetite deteriorated,” with the proceeds going almost one-for-one into dollars that clients kept. The weaker mood came from a sell-off in technology shares, which pulled other risk assets down with them.

According to its October 26 weekly market wrap, clients barely touched crypto itself. Bitcoin and Ether traded in small sizes with no clear direction, Solana and XRP drew only isolated interest, and stablecoins and foreign exchange made up most of the desk’s volume. On the FX side, US dollars were significantly net bought, while AUDD, an Australian dollar stablecoin, was again significantly net sold. Every signal on the desk pointed toward dollars.

Three weeks of USDT exits

Read across, the reports show a shift. Earlier in October, clients leaving USDT were still moving into USDC, and the October 20 report said they were using AUDD as a local route into dollar stablecoins. That was also the week the European Banking Authority classified USDC as the first “significant” e-money token under the EU’s MiCA rules, placing its reserves and liquidity under the regulator’s direct oversight. By the latest week, the USDC buying had faded to balance and the proceeds went into plain dollars. Clients moved from switching between stablecoins to stepping out of them.

Crypto’s waiting room is losing tenants

Stablecoins are usually where crypto capital waits. A Kansas City Fed briefing estimated that 48.8% of stablecoins are held as trading assets, including capital parked between trades, against just 0.7% used for payments. Zerocap’s clients did not park their capital there this time. They took it out of crypto’s rails altogether.

Zerocap gives no sizes, so its desk cannot show what the whole market did. DeFiLlama’s supply data, checked on October 26 at 12:17 UTC, points the same way.

Together, the two largest dollar stablecoins lost $2.12 billion of supply in a week. USDC’s percentage drop was more than double USDT’s, even though Zerocap’s own USDC flows were balanced, so the market-wide picture is not a USDT-only story. The two measures are also different: when a desk passes a client’s USDT to another buyer, the tokens stay in circulation, and supply only falls when issuers redeem them. Desk flows and supply data are separate signals pointing the same way.

Why a stablecoin is a costly place to wait

Every dollar behind a stablecoin earns interest, but the issuer keeps it. Circle, which issues USDC, reported a reserve return rate of 3.48% in the second quarter of 2026, and reserve income made up about 95% of its revenue. In the US, the GENIUS Act bars payment stablecoin issuers from paying holders interest simply for holding the coin.

That gap matters more when rates stay high. Zerocap’s desk expects the Federal Reserve to hold its policy rate in the 3.75% to 4.00% range at this week’s meeting. A BIS working paper by Rashad Ahmed and Iñaki Aldasoro, using weekly US data from January 2019 to June 2025, found that higher bank deposit rates predicted slower stablecoin growth, with a stronger link for USDC than USDT, in line with the argument that deposit rates can compete with stablecoin balances. Zerocap does not say whether its clients’ dollars earn interest, or why they chose cash, beyond the weaker risk appetite.

What would bring the money back

The firm points to this week’s Fed decision on Wednesday and earnings from Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon as the next tests for risk appetite. Until then, its strategist Emir Ibrahim argued that for crypto holders it is “a better moment to look at protective structures than to sell outright,” and the desk is offering principal-protected notes with 85% capital protection and 103% upside participation.

If the money returns, the first sign should appear on desks like Zerocap’s, as dollars flow back into stablecoins before anything else. For now, its clients have chosen cash.

This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.

Author

Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets – crypto first, then everything else.

It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn’t fully understand it – so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can’t properly understand one without the other.

What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it’s happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline – price up, price down, here’s a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn?

He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University – not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That’s probably why he hasn’t stopped.

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