$2.8 billion worth of USDT is now available, after the company released tokens taken out of circulation back in October – and just printing an additional 300 million.
Tether. It’s the dirty secret of the crypto space. The question mark over its reputation. The locked closet potentially filled with skeletons. Towards the end of last year, as the questions over Tether increased and bitcoin plummeted, Tether pulled around 800 million USDT from circulation. There was rejoicing; with new stablecoin competitors like TUSD and Gemini dollars, the crypto world assumed that Tether would be going out of fashion.
They didn’t stay free of controversy, though. A month ago, Tether slyly changed its website to suggest they might now be running a fractional reserve. Plenty of people were already worried that all those USDT weren’t backed by real dollars in a real bank account. Now, Tether all but admitted it was using other collateral of varying quality. But USDT remained popular. And, it seems, it’s not going out of fashion any time soon.
As confidence returns to the crypto markets, Tether has been putting USDT back into circulation. The market cap now stands at over $2.8 billion, back to what it was at the start of October 2018.
Just a few hours ago, another 300 million USDT were issued. In the past, critics have noted that new USDT issued seems to correspond with price pumps. Were they printing fake money and using it to buy real BTC? What’s going on now, and what’s about to happen? Does the new USDT reflect new demand in the market, or is Tether playing games?
We may never know the full truth about Tether. But they are, once again, active and printing new tokens. Tether may have been partly responsible for the bubble to $20,000. A lot of people hoped that they wouldn’t be a feature of the next market cycle. But the crypto space hasn’t evolved fast enough. Tether is still here. It’s still the most popular stablecoin.
And now, it looks like the shady folk at Tether are going to start right back where they left off.
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