For those who are holding USD in your pocket, you may not feel anything in the past week, but other fiat currency holders could definitely feel a roller coaster ride for USD exchange rate, especially those who are in import-export business or exchage trading.

In the past week before FOMC meeting on Friday Aug 27th, 2021, there had been an expectation from economists that FED would start tapering QE and increase interest rate by the end of year 2021, so USD appreciated immediately before coming back down this week. A roller-coaster incident for major currency like USD should be a very good time to consider collecting or selling stablecoins such as USDC and USDT since we all know that these two coins have value pegged to US dollar, especially USDC which pegging mechanism uses 100% collateralization approach. Fortunately somehow USDC and USDT didn't move along with US dollar immediately, so that left some room to buy or sell in crypto market because sooner or later they would have to follow US Dollar direction. However this might work for countries with free float exchange rate, but not those with controlled exchange rate.

So we know now that FED is warming up QE tapering and interest rate is on the upward trend with the strong signs of US economy uprising. It's highly likely that USD will appreciate in value again soon. I think it's a good time to start collecting USDC or USDT. At the same time we can stake or farm stable coins for higher yield. However this might be counter-intuitive.

During the bull market, people tend to hold any coins, but are reluctant to hold stablecoins. In other words, they would like to keep profit running, rather than holding it stable, which is right, and we can see from the chart during the bull market. While Bitcoin and other Alt coins rally up in green,  all stablecoins go down in red. Everyone is a risk taker because they believe the market will keep going up. However during the bear market, it will be a completely different story, stablecoins up, cryptos down. People keep their fund in stable coins to protect their investment from downturn. So there are demands which drive the cost of holding stable coin during that time to be higher than normal.

This does not apply to people living in USA or using USD as a major currency, but other Fiat currencies in the world exchange basket will be affected by USD appreciation and, as a result, people holding other Fiats have to pay more for stable coins.

There are a lot of farms, lending and staking platforms that offer quite an  attractive yield for stable coin holders, but I'd like to share with you what I'm doing with my USDC right now at Zipmex which I think got the best deal. They offer 11% APY for locking USDC 45 days and they also pay back in USDC too. Just go straight to a program called "Ziplock".

Unlike Celsius or Nexo which offer the rate up to 12% but you have to choose to receive the interest in their own coins. Moreover you may need to have some extra deposits, or hold their coins aside within a period of time in order to rank up your level to receive higher yield. On the contrary, Zipmex is quite straightforward, deposit USDC to receive USDC at the 11% without any condition. The only problem is that you have to be able to lock that amount for 45 days which should be no problem with the stablecoin.

By doing this, at the time when the market dips, then we should have a handful of funds to start collecting crypto at cheaper cost.