Tether’s Market Cap Explodes, Asian OTC Trading Up 52% In The Last 12 Months

Is bitcoin price ready for yet another spike? Looks like it!

Tether has printed another 2.5 million USDT, this time on Tron blockchain.

Earlier this year, Tron announced support for a native USDT stablecoin on its network. And in Q2, Tether officially started minting USDT on Tron blockchain.

On Oct. 14, Tether printed 2.5 million USDT, reported Whale Alert.

💵 2,500,000 #USDT (2,511,173 USD) minted at Tether Treasury

Tx: https://t.co/6oGFpdj8O6

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 14, 2019

As we have seen in the past, whenever new USDT enters the market, Bitcoin price takes a hike. So, it is possible in the coming days, we could see an upward movement.

At the time of writing, BTC has been trading at $8,306 with 24 hours gains of 0.31 percent, as per Coincodex. Trading volume, though slightly up is at still nearly $190 million only.

China’s Trading Ban Fueling Tether’s Rise?

Controversial coin Tether is a popular stablecoin, whose over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading in China has been exploding as traders use it to buy nearly all of their Bitcoin.

This year, Tether was used in 99% of the Bitcoin spot trades in China. According to Chainalysis, about 40% of the top-50 crypto exchanges, the Bitcoin on-chain activity, are placed in the Asia-Pacific region.

These exchanges also accounted for 35% of all BTC received, in the first half of 2019 while 90% of the 2.36 billion contracts in options and futures traded globally belongs to the region's exchanges.

“People should be paying more attention to the price formation on the large Asian exchanges,”

Philip Gradwell, chief economist at New York-based Chainalysis told Bloomberg.

“There’s probably going to be a large amount of liquidity there that, for example, these OTC brokers will be providing. It can move very fast.”

Tether’s Dominance began in 2018 after the Chinese government prohibited the exchange of yuan for crypto. Since then people have been exchanging yuan for USDT via peer-to-peer trades or over the counter to buy BTC and other coins.

Over the counter crypto trading in China has grown exponentially. Just over 10 OTC Asian brokers, tracked by Chainalsysis, received $877 million of BTC in the year ended Sept., up 52% from the last 12 months.

“The size is just kind of astonishing,”

said Kim Grauer, senior economist at Chainalysis.

Tether’s market capitalization has also tripled since 2018 beginning. It also surpassed Bitcoin as the most used cryptocurrency.