USD Coin, Binance Coin, Dogecoin, and Bitcoin Cash - 2025

USD Coin, Binance Coin, Dogecoin, and Bitcoin Cash: Altcoins to Keep An Eye On 

In recent years, the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies has undisputedly changed the world of finance. The crypto market is constantly evolving, and it has undergone significant changes since Bitcoin’s birth in 2009.

Back then, it was just an experimental digital currency, but it has evolved into a colorful ecosystem of various blockchain projects with unique value propositions.

While Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether currently dominate the crypto world, Ripple, Solana, and TRON have emerged as strong challengers. Still, there are myriad cryptocurrencies out there, and quite a few are worth mentioning, especially because more and more poker and casino sites add these up-and-coming cryptos to their payment methods.

In this article, we will take a detailed look at four different cryptocurrencies that are frequently used as payment methods on poker sites. With their own ups and downs, each of these cryptos represents a different aspect of the digital asset revolution:

1. USD Coin (USDC) is the regulated stablecoin standard
2. Binance Coin (BNB) is the exchange token with expanding utility
3. Dogecoin (DOGE) is the meme coin that became a cultural phenomenon
4. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the scalable Bitcoin alternative

We hope our guide, supplemented by expert opinion, will give you a solid overview of USD Coin, Binance Coin, Dogecoin, and Bitcoin Cash’s technological background, adoption metrics, competitive advantages, and future outlook to help you navigate through today’s complex crypto landscape.

USD Coin (USDC): The Institutional Stablecoin

USD Coin is a fully regulated stablecoin backed by the fiat currency US dollar. It is pegged 1:1 to USD, and it is governed by Centre Consortium, a company founded by Circle and Coinbase. The stablecoin operates as a token under Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard with multi-chain expansion possibilities.

When creating USD Coin (USDC), the founders designed the stablecoin to be transparent, compliant, and interoperable. The stablecoin is backed by 100 percent cash collateral and short-term U.S. treasuries that are audited every month.

The currency has a blacklist function to comply with regulations: Circle can freeze addresses of sanctioned entities, and KYC (Know Your Customer) verification or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) is required for minting and redemption of USDC tokens. USD Coin (USDC) can be found natively on Ethereum (ERC-20), Solana (SPL token), Algorand, Stellar, TRON, and many other networks thanks to Circle’s cross-chain protocols.

Reserve Breakdown & Transparency

An attestation report audited by Deloitte in January 2024 confirmed the stablecoin’s 1:1 backing with $24.8 billion total reserves, of which around $20.3 billion was in short-term U.S. treasuries, and around $4.5 billion in cash held at regulated banks like BNY Mellon and Citizens Bank.

The audit also confirmed that USD Coin has a daily redemption capacity of $3 billion, meaning that users can always cash out large sums in a short period of time. This capacity is of paramount importance since the Silicon Valley Bank crisis of March 2023, when $3.3 billion was stuck temporarily.

Comparison to Competitors

USD Coin (USDC) is clearly ahead of its biggest competitors, Tether’s USDT, and MakerDAO’s decentralized stablecoin DAI, in terms of transparency and compliance:

*Tether’s cash reserves remain disputed.

DeFi Integration

USD Coin dominates Decentralized Finance (DeFi), the financial system that aims to replace banks and brokers with smart contracts based on blockchain technology.

Thanks to its trusted reserves and multi-chain availability, USD Coin is responsible for a share of 63 percent (around $25 billion) of all Total Value Locked (TVL, around $40 billion) in stablecoins.

USD Coin (USDC) is also the preferred collateral on the top DeFi lending/borrowing protocols, with $5.2 billion USDC deposits on Aave, $3.8 billion on Compound, and $1.2 billion on MakerDAO.

Institutional Adoption

The stablecoin seems to have gained mainstream trust in the past years, functioning as a kind of ‘crypto-dollar’ for market-leading enterprises like Visa or BlackRock.

Visa, one of the biggest card payment companies in the world, has a partnership with the token’s founder, Circle, and settles cross-border transactions via USDC, enabling instant payouts for merchants in US dollars.

BlackRock, the world’s largest portfolio management company, uses USDC for money market fund operations like its first tokenized money market fund, BUIDL. The company also holds cash equivalents in USDC to ensure liquidity.

What’s more, 78 percent of crypto hedge funds hold USDC reserves, because they tend to prefer it over USDT due to its regulatory compliance, transparent reserves, and DeFi integration.

Risk Scenario Analysis

As of April 2025, there are ongoing talks about proposed US stablecoin regulations. According to Ryan Watkins, who is a Senior Analyst at Messari, the leading provider of crypto market intelligence products, a new stablecoin bill could result in USDC taking an even larger share of the stablecoin market.

‘If the U.S. passes stablecoin legislation requiring 1:1 cash backing, USDC could gain market share at Tether’s expense. However, any Treasury default risk would immediately impact USDC’s reserves, he said.

Binance Coin (BNB): The Exchange Token Empire 

In July 2017, during its Initial Coin Offering (ICO), Binance raised $15 million in 20 days, selling BNB tokens that were initially tokens using the ERC-20 protocol on Ethereum, to fund its exchange launch.
In 2019, Binance Coin was migrated to Binance’s own BNB Chain as a native token using the BEP-2 protocol. Two years later, in 2021, it was expanded to the BNB Smart Chain and became compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Binance Coin currently powers a DeFi ecosystem worth more than $5 billion.

BNB Chain Ecosystem Growth

BNB Chain is one of the most active blockchain ecosystems these days. Its low fees drive more than 3.2 million daily transactions compared to Ethereum’s 1 million.

To say that the mass adoption of BNB was a success is an understatement: as of 2024, there are more than 230 million unique wallet addresses on the BNB chain, many of them exchange-managed.

The chain also hosts one of the crypto world’s most diverse ecosystems with more than 1,500 active decentralized applications (dApps).

Leading Projects

The most notable of these applications is undoubtedly the top decentralized exchange (DEX) on the BNB Chain, PancakeSwap V3, which is responsible for 78 percent of the chain’s DeFi Volume. As of 2024, there was $1.5 billion in Total Value Locked on PancakeSwap.

Another popular dApp is Alien Worlds, a play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game explicitly built for the BNB Chain. The game is about mining tokens, battling, and governing a virtual metaverse. With no upfront cost, simple gameplay, and valuable NFT rewards,  Alien Worlds boasted 1.8 million active users every month in 2024.

Last but not least, BNB Chain’s decentralized lending and borrowing platform, Venus Protocol, is a key dApp in the ecosystem with more than $800 million in loans originated.

Binance’s Legal Settlement

Binance agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to $4.3 billion settlement for violating several regulatory compliance rules, including money laundering and sanctions evasion.

The settlement impacted Binance’s market share, with its spot trading share dropping from 52 percent to 44 percent. BNB Coin’s price also dropped by 18 percent due to concerns over potential restrictions immediately after the settlement, but Binance proved operational resilience, and the coin’s price recovered by 32 percent.

The company implemented major compliance measures that helped BNB’s price rebound. Binance made KYC identification mandatory for all users, established a U.S. oversight team to monitor transactions and report to regulators, and launched a Proof-of-Reserves (PoR) system with audits every month.

Exchange Expert Opinion

According to a Crypto Strategist at Marex Solution, Ilan Solot, Binance’s competitors are on the rise.

‘Binance remains the liquidity king, but OKX and Bybit are capturing derivative market share. BNB’s value hinges on whether Binance can maintain its first-mover advantages in institutional services, he said.

Dogecoin (DOGE): Elon Musk’s Pet Memecoin

In 2013, Billy Markus, an engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer, a project manager at Adobe, launched a cryptocurrency to make fun of the rising cryptocurrency hype. The coin’s inspiration was the famous meme of a Shiba Inu breed dog, and thus it was named Dogecoin.

Elon Musk Influence Timeline

Between 2014 and 2020, Dogecoin was only used to tip on Reddit and Twitter (now X). Still, everything changed when billionaire businessman Elon Musk tweeted about it before his SNL appearance in May 2021.

‘Dogecoin is the people’s crypto, ’ posted Musk, and DOGE rallied from $0.25 to $0.74, an incredible 120 percent increase in price. Two years later, in April 2023, when Musk had already acquired Twitter, the businessman replaced the platform’s blue bird logo with Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu logo, and the coin’s price saw another 25 percent increase. In 2024, Musk’s space technology company, SpaceX, launched a satellite mission funded entirely with Dogecoin, when the cryptocurrency’s price increased once more by 18 percent.

Santiment, a company analyzing cryptocurrency price movements, tracked more than 120 tweets from Musk between 2020 and 2024, and found that DOGE on average moved more than 5 percent within 1 hour of 78 percent of Musk’s crypto-related tweets. The company also found that different types of tweets influenced price action to various degrees:

Blockchain Activity

Dogecoin is a relatively high-usage payment coin while having low fees, on average $0.15. It has around 60,000 transactions per day, which is quite high considering it is primarily used for simple transfers but has no smart contracts, NFTs, or DeFi integration.

DOGE also has a strong retail following, with more than 5 million wallets holding more than 100 coins. Many owners hold the crypto as a kind of lottery ticket in case Elon Musk bumps up the price again with a social media post.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH): BTC’s Questionable Alternative

Bitcoin Cash launched in 2017 to address scalability issues and debates about Bitcoin’s transaction fees. 

BTC had slow transactions and fees as high as $10-$50 during the 2017 congestion due to its 1MB block size. While BCH kept Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work consensus, its block size is eight times bigger, while average fees are sometimes a hundred times smaller.

Scalability Solutions Comparison

Adoption Challenges

Despite its technical improvements, Bitcoin Cash has struggled to get mainstream attention. Its developer activity dropped by 83 percent since 2020, and its merchant acceptance was below Bitcoin’s, with 1,200 compared to more than 15,000. If BCH doesn’t get more developer momentum, it might risk becoming a niche project.

Before You Invest in Crypto

Apart from the possibility of investment, cryptocurrencies are a great way to deposit and withdraw funds from poker and casino sites.

Fiat currency transactions usually have a much longer processing time, often measured in days, and relatively high transaction fees. As more and more poker platforms support crypto transactions that are often feeless and lightning-fast, they might be the most convenient payment methods for most players.

Before you decide to buy crypto, though, you should be aware that the crypto market is still quite young, and Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the USDT stablecoin are evolving rapidly. Owning or trading most cryptocurrencies always carries the risk of losing money because of their highly volatile nature.

It is advised to take the time to understand the assets you want to hold and learn some basic risk management before buying crypto. To end our article, here are a few tips on how to make investments in crypto safer.

Choose a Reputable Exchange

There are many shady cryptocurrency exchanges out there, so make sure to use a legit service. Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken are legitimate exchanges. Each of them has its pros and cons, with Coinbase being the best for beginners, Binance having the highest liquidity, and Kraken being the most secure.

Secure Your Investments

Always enable Two-Factor Authentication on the exchange platform you use, so your cryptos cannot get stolen easily. If you plan to hold your cryptos for the long term, consider buying a hardware wallet like Ledger or Trezor.

Diversify Your Portfolio

As with all assets, portfolio diversification is a great way to manage risk. The most commonly advised diversification for cryptos is 60 percent BTC for long-term value storage, 30 percent ETH due to its growth potential from DeFi or NFTs, and 10 percent USDT to hedge against volatility.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional investment advice. Investing carries risks, including the potential loss of capital. Always conduct your research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. The author and publisher are not responsible for any financial losses incurred as a result of actions taken based on the content of this article. Invest at your own risk .