The past 8 hours have been very dramatic in the crypto scene. Bitcoin ascended rapidly and pushed over $9100, and at the same time, the US dollar-backed stablecoin Tether (USDT) had over 160 million tokens mined.
According to Whalebot Alerts, there are over 160 million tokens that were mined in the past 24 hours, and the surprising fact is that all that happened in just two transactions. The first transaction was $60 million and the second one $100 million. The first transaction occurred when bitcoin was only more than $8k, and the second transaction was then bitcoin just passed $8.5k.
There has been a high movement of USDT from investors between Binance and OKEx. Within 12 hours, there are up to 91 million tokens were transferred to the two exchanges, with the majority going to Binance. From the 160 million, only 22 million came from the Tether Treasury.
The current minting that is going on is not a new thing. The Tether Treasury has a history of minting since its inception. So far, there are close to $7.8 billion in the total USD assets. The rapid issue of tokens by the firm has raised a lot of eyebrows. Issuing over one billion in one month is not a norm for many companies. According to analysts, this is some sort of market manipulation as it may drive up other crypto prices.
USDT has faced a lot of controversies from the word go. Many think that it is not worth holding for any length of time. Already, it had a court case in 2019, where it was discovered that only 74% was backed with fiat currency. That makes it not qualify to be a stablecoin as it does not meet the 1:1 ratio for stablecoin.
The company’s move to print a lot of USDT was not received warmly. It created a lot of negative feedback, with critics being very loud. Unlike in the initial stages where a new mint received bullish expectations, currently, every fresh mint is received with mockery. To justify its minting, the firm maintained that its printing is to meet the rising demand for the stablecoin. According to the company, USDT is too big to fail. Many people believe that there is a correlation between BTC and USDT, even though it may not be strong.
Image from Flickr.com
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