Tether (USDT) Market Cap Loses $300 Million USD but Prints $50M Today

Tether Market Capitalization Falls and Loses $300 Million Dollars

In the last three weeks, Tether has reduced its market capitalization moving from $2.7 billion dollars to $2.4. This is the second time that the virtual currency tethered to the US dollar registers such a contraction in its supply.

The USD-pegged currency is now one of the most important in the market ranked in the 9th position as it continually tops the charts as exceeding the most trading volume day in and day out right behind bitcoin. The currency tends to be traded at $1 dollar or very closely to it, with small variations of just some cents depending on the market. Ironically, the USDT stablecoin seems to have a reverse effect on the charts and market as when Tether goes red, all coins are in the green, and when most tokens go red, Tether goes green.

If you have been around in the space for any length of time, the USDT controversy is not new and has been the focal point of many experts and industry pundits who have studied and questioned its authenticity and transparency. The currency has been involved in controversy about its funds and how it was used to pump the virtual currency market during hard drops. Tether has never been audited by more than just one company that only said that it has the funds to back all the tokens.

It seems that this conversion from Tether to USD that we have seen is related to a decreased interest from individuals in the virtual currency market. Binance is one of those exchanges were Tether is used the most.

During the last months, some local exchanges in different countries in South America and Africa, begun adding USDT pairs to help investors with arbitrage trading.

The team at BitcoinExchangeGuide was able to find that 50,000,000 USDT have been transferred from The Tether Treasury to Bitfinex (who have always had quite an interesting relationship as many have always connected them as one in the same). The interesting thing here is that the time the tokens were sent to this exchange was very close to the time of the pump we have seen in the market in the last hours.

Back in June, finance professor John Griffin and Amin Shams, wrote that ‘Tether seems to be sued both to stabilize and manipulate Bitcoin prices.’

Griffin commented on the matter:

“I’ve looked at a lot of markets. If there’s fraud or manipulation in a market it can leave tracks in the data. The tracks in the data here are very consistent with a manipulation hypothesis.”

In addition to it, Griffin explained that the pattern has only been seen at the Bitfinex exchange and not on other platforms.

A quick search into the crypto twitter universe and we find others who are weighing in on the recent drop yet issuance of $50 million new USDT tokens:

When $BTC is dead but the folks at Tether print another $50M pic.twitter.com/9l0NbZKi72

— Rob "Crypto Bobby" Paone (@crypto_bobby) August 11, 2018

The SEC would be reckless in ever approving a crypto-ETF or even a Bitcoin ETF. The price of all crypto-currencies is massively manipulated: pump & dump schemes, front running, wash trading, use of fiat-created Tether to manipulate BTC; & any other possible form of manipulation

— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) August 8, 2018

https://twitter.com/BullyEsq/status/1025196536416940034

Earlier this month Binance CEO was even on record saying “with Tether, the concern is always there.”

Are these last actions a market manipulation to help Bitcoin remain above $6,000 dollars?