Tanya Abrosimova
Independent Analyst
- Tether has bigger daily trading volume than Bitcoin.
- Many cryptocurrency exchange customers do not know that they use USDT instead of USD.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency with the total market value $151 billion. BTC has the biggest market share, close to 70%; and probably the biggest army of supporters. However, when it comes to usage, Bitcoin takes a back seat to another coin.
According to the data, complained by CoinMarketCap, a stable coin Tether has the largest daily trading volume - over $21 billion at the time of writing against Bitcoin’s $16 billion. Tether’s trading volume has been consistently higher than Bitcoin’s since the beginning of August, despite the fact that Tether market value is just $4 billion, which is nearly 40 times s smaller as compared to Bitcoin.
“If there is no Tether, we lose a massive amount of daily volume -- around $1 billion or more depending on the data source. Some of the concerning potential patters of trading in the market may start to fall away,” says Lex Sokolin, global financial technology co-head at ConsenSys, as cited by Bloomberg.
Considering huge trading volumes, Tether is considered an important part of the cryptocurrency industry and a pathway from fiat to crypto world in many countries like China, where cryptocurrency exchanges are banned.
According to the recent research data, Tether is used in 40% of all transactions on Binance and in 80% on Huobi - these are the two largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Meanwhile, about 70% of all cryptocurrency trading volume is produced by Asian traders.
However, oftentimes, exchanges make the impression customers are holding dollars, but in fact, they hold tether because banks won’t allow them to have dollar accounts and hold dollars on behalf of customers.
“I don’t think people actually trust Tether -- I think people use Tether without realizing that they are using it, and instead think they have actual dollars in a bank account somewhere,” Thaddeus Dryja, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains.
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