Tether, the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, has crossed the US$35 billion mark.
The company claims USDT is rallying amid growing institutional and corporate demand, but the stablecoin is usually most bought when cryptocurrency holders are in risk-off mode.
Within the crypto space, stablecoins are the safest asset as they are supposedly backed by the USD in a one-to-one ratio. Interestingly enough, New York State Attorney General has just banned Tether and its parent company Bitfinex from operating in the state for failing to hold enough reserves.
Both companies will disburse $18.5 million after the OAG having reviewed 2.5 million documents that allegedly prove Bitfinex and Tether failed to hold enough dollar reserves to match the USDT available in the market. AG Letitia James and her team found the exchange operator was ripped off by a Panama entity in nearly $1 billion.
As the USDt reached US$35 billion in market capitalization, the firm announced “the ‘Tetherization’ of trading continues at a pace with many digital token spot exchanges denominating pairs in USDt rather than bitcoin (BTC). Meanwhile, USDt is increasingly being used in remittances and innovative projects in the digital token ecosystem, including those in the nascent space of decentralised finance (DeFi).”
Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Tether, said: “The market has once again spoken: people like using Tether. Our growth reflects the utility of Tether in the overall digital token ecosystem, with the market capitalization of bitcoin recently surpassing the US$1 trillion mark. The cryptocurrency space is disrupting the legacy financial system and Tether is playing an important role in this regard, powering myriad projects in the space. Together we are overcoming challenges once thought of as insurmountable as we build an alternative financial system.”
USDt works across various blockchains, including Algorand, Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni and Tron.
