Tether Overtakes Monero and Dash as Investors Wait for Bull Market

U.S. dollar backed stablecoin Tether (USDT) has overtaken privacy coins Monero and Dash to reach the 12th highest cryptocurrency by market cap following a recent drop in prices. As crypto investors store more of their value in Tether, the amount of money waiting for a bull run to enter the market is on the rise.

Over the past two weeks, Monero and Dash have succumbed to the downward pressures of the current bear market and dropped below Tether, which has a market cap of $2.5 billion. This highlights how many people who own cryptocurrencies have moved into the altcoin during the past six months, and the amount of money that’s ready to move back into the market when conditions are favourable.

While Tether’s market cap is only a fraction of the crypto total market valuation, it may account for up to 25% of the industry. Developer Sam Aiken points out that Tether’s market cap directly relates to the number of dollars held by owners while the market total of a cryptocurrency is much greater than the amount of money put into it.

An analysis by JPMorgan held that only $6 billion had entered the industry by February 2017 when the total market cap was $300 billion. Even if we double that figure to represent the influx of money over the past year, the amount of money held in Tether would account for about a fifth of the total in cryptocurrencies ($292 billion today). It is not surprising then that the 12th ranked altcoin accounts for 20% of the 24hr volume rankings by currency. This shows the amount of money that’s waiting for the next bull run.

On June 6, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) refused a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the subpoenas issued to Tether last year. It is unclear what the subpoenas were for, but questions have been raised over whether each Tether is backed by a U.S. dollar as it claims. This issue resurfaced after 250 million more were printed at the end of May.

In May, Binance added the pairing USDT/TUSD or Tether to TrueUSD (TUSD). This allows users to swap each stablecoin worth $1 dollar for the other. This may seem pointless, but it opens up an easy way for investors to move away from Tether which hasn’t fulfilled an audit and dissolved its relationship with auditors Friedman LLP. As an alternative, TrueUSDs can be exchanged for U.S. dollars and they undergo third party audits. This pairing is also available on Kraken, and Bittrex has USD/TUSD and USD/USDT pairings.

Ontology has recently been given a USDT pairing on Binance ahead of its mainnet launch on June 30. They also teamed up with NEO in May to help develop the NEO smart economy and plan on adding Dynamic Sharding in a move to catch up with rivals Zilliqa and Ethereum.

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