Stablecoin issuer Tether has achieved a new record of 2 billion USDT issued over the past week. Consequently, the volume of USDT emissions on all networks that support it, including Ethereum, Tron, and Omni, reached 24.6 billion.
Sam Trabucco, an Alameda Research trader, believes there are a couple of reasons for this development.
“Many people don’t trust their local banks or state currencies. USDT represents a very liquid channel on the market to acquire access to the US dollar,” he noted.
Another reason is “the aggressive trading of Bitcoin for USDT” including operations the other way around. As a result of this, the USDT rate may sometimes deviate from the anchor currency in an up or down direction. From the beginning of January, the USDT price has been moving slightly above the dollar until it dropped below it on Monday, according to Kraken data.
Paolo Ardoino, the Tether CTO, shared that large new investors are actively using USDT to trade on the international market, rather than currency exchanges, and this is driving the increase in the number of stablecoin tokens currently in use.
“Tether’s users include all kinds of major OTC platforms and high-frequency trading companies,” he reiterated.
These platforms convert their client funds into USDT thus distributing buying pressure across various sources of liquidity, rapidly increasing demand for stablecoin assets.
