Tether Jumps by $2 Billion, Close to Overtaking Ripple as it Passes Bitcoin Cash

Tether’s market cap has suddenly increased by an incredible $2 billion with this being the biggest jump ever for the tokenized dollar.

Just two years ago tether’s entire market cap was $2.5 billion. It rose to $4.5 billion just before this huge astonishing jump to circa $6.5 billion.

It has now taken Bitcoin Cash, which used to be the fourth biggest crypto, and is not far off from surpassing Ripple to third position.

Tether says their total USDT assets are now above $7 billion, $5 billion of it running on ethereum, while another $1.5 billion is running on bitcoin’s Omni layer.

Interestingly just $400 million have been authorized, but not issued. That means they’ve already ‘printed’ the tokens, but to avoid signing too often with their private keys, they do so in bulk.

No one seems to care about the euro for some reason, presumably because this is mainly used by traders on exchanges and such exchanges don’t tend to offer the euro option.

Just how much this is used is shown by the fact tether handled $46 billion in trading volumes for the past 24 hours.

That’s $10 billion more than bitcoin, which handled $35 billion, and more than twice eth’s $18 billion.

Interestingly, $18 billion is ethereum’s total market cap, making it a bit puzzling as to how the trading volumes can also be $18 billion when for bitcoin they’re about 20% its market cap.

These are unaudited data however, Coinmarketcap is just going by what exchanges tell them, exchanges which of course can lie.

That applies to these tether stats too, which are unaudited, but they’re on the ethereum blockchain so can be analyzed for the activity that happens on-chain before they’re deposited on exchangess.

Or indeed withdrawn, with 66,000 bitcoin leaving Bifinex over the last month. Paolo Ardoino (pictured) the Bitfinex CTO, said:

“Several large whale OTC deals happened. Bitfinex yet again demonstrates that it is the exchange of reference to manage secure, compliant, and large OTC operations.”

That 66,000 bitcoin is worth about half a billion at the current price, with another circa half a billion not yet issued. Where did this other $1 billion come from?

Talk of potentially banning stablecoins perhaps has led to a rush to get some tether, but if they are banned, it’s not clear how it would maintain the peg.

Rising demand for bitcoin and other cryptos maybe is another reason with this potentially being a leading indicator as you can see the issuance onchain instantly.

Especially in China and other countries where there are capital controls and the like, USDT and other pegged tokens like it can be an easy way of joining the crypto market in a time of mass devaluation, so potentially explaining this huge rise in demand for USDT.

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