Another 20M Tether (USDT) Has Just Been Freshly Minted

Tether Treasury has been ramping up its USDT issuing as we close out 2019. The largest stablecoin has just issued another 20,000,000 USDT, which will be entering the market shortly. Whale Alert (@whale_alert) reported on the fresh USDT earlier today.

💵 💵 20,000,000 #USDT (19,945,873 USD) minted at Tether Treasury

Tx: https://t.co/Hk0pjeKOEn

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 27, 2019

In the past week, there has been a significant uptick in USDT issuing. As BeInCrypto previously reported, Tether Treasury issued another 30M USDT on December 20th.  Although USDT is controversial, Bitcoin’s rallies have been strongly correlated with USDT issuances. In fact, 70% of Bitcoin’s rallies have followed fresh USDT entering the market. So, the correlation is quite strong, which makes a rally in the short-term probable. At the time of writing, Bitcoin has been relatively stable at around the $7,300 price point. For the past week, it has managed to stay consistently above $7,000. Although new USDT issuings are often met with optimism on future market movements, some expressed skepticism over how long this can go on. USDT has long been criticized for not being forthright about how much of its USD reserves actually back the stablecoin issuings. Previously, Tether’s co-founder said that it “doesn’t really matter” if USDT is backed by an equal amount of dollars—a serious red flag. https://twitter.com/Whalefools/status/1210634143605895168 https://twitter.com/SirbuOffice/status/1210631834763177984 Although tether’s circulating supply has stayed relatively stable for the second half of 2019 but has issued another 50M USDT in just the past week alone. There is some evidence to suggest that the stablecoin is feeling the pressure from its competitors, but it still remains the most-traded cryptocurrency in the entire market. Since this summer, Tether (USDT) has seen consistently higher trading volume than Bitcoin.  Based on the past week, it seems that the USDT issuance rate is not going to slow down much in 2020. Whether or not this will catch up to Tether Treasury someday, and whether they will be appropriately audited, remains to be seen.