The issuer of the largest-stablecoin by market capitalization, Tether, authorised the issuance of 450 million new USDT tokens over the past two days. This occurred as Bitcoin rose to $13,000 for the first time this year.
According to Whale Alert, on October 20 Tether issued 150 million USDT, and on October 22 – 300 million USDT.
Both transactions augmented the stablecoin’s circulating supply on the Tron blockchain. The first occurred before news about adding PayPal support for buying and selling Bitcoin.
Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino explained that the issuer decided to bolster USDT reserves in anticipation of additional demand.
“This is an authorized, but not executed transaction. These assets will be used to back the next period of issuance requests,” he wrote.
💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 150,000,000 #USDT (150,449,452 USD) minted at Tether Treasury
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 20, 2020
PSA: 300M USDt inventory replenish on Tron Network. Note this is a authorized but not issued transaction, meaning that this amount will be used as inventory for next period issuance requests.
— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) October 21, 2020
As of writing, the issuer had distributed 160 million USDT among exchanges Binance and Huobi, as well as several well-known addresses.
According to the transparency site for Tether, authorised but not issued on the Tron blockchain remain 282 million coins. Roughly the same on the Omni blockchain, and 23.9 million coins on the Ethereum blockchain.
The total circulating supply of USDT stands at $16.22 billion, of which $10.33 billion are issued on the Ethereum blockchain.
The previous episode of active Tether issuance occurred in July this year, when Bitcoin’s price surged to a 10-month high.
In April, researchers concluded that the issuance of Tether and other stablecoins does not drive cryptocurrencies higher.
Over the past three years, the share of trades denominated in USDT has increased from 5% to 70%.
What is Tether (USDT)?
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