A new report is featured in the coming altcoin news, showing that approximately 300 addresses hold at least $1 million worth of Tether (USDT). Conducted by the Massachusetts based cryptocurrency market research company named Coin Metrics, the report shows that 318 addresses contain the million which is roughly 80% of Tether’s worth.
Before this, many best cryptocurrency news sites as well as Bloomberg reported that Tether (USDT) has some whales. According to the Coin Metrics co-founder Nic Carter, some of the USDT whales include major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bitfinex and Binance.
Aside from talking about the 300 addresses, the report also notes that it is staggeringly different from the distribution of Bitcoin (BTC) for which whales allegedly hold only around 20% of the total token supply. Meanwhile, the latest cryptocurrency news show that over 20,000 BTC addresses reportedly hold at least $1 million in the (equivalent) assets.
Despite Bitcoin (BTC) being a cryptocurrency that is more evenly distributed among the user base, the USDT whales may be able to swing the Bitcoin price on their own, as the University of Texas at Austin finance professor John Griffin believes.
“The concentration of Tether suggests that control of Tether is in the hands of a few central players who can swing Bitcoin prices, and have a vested interest in doing so […] It also suggests that many exchange players have a vested interest in keeping the Tether game going,” he noted, without mentioning the 300 addresses that hold $1 million of USDT.
According to the report, Griffin has previously linked USDT to market manipulation as well as its rally to the all time high in 2017. Sid Shekhar, who is the co-founder of the market tracker TokenAnalyst, also said that there are market concerns related to volatility that come into play whenever a large sum of USDT is injected in the market.
All of this is in times when Tether (USDT) is growing in terms of its usage. The recent altcoin news show that USDT is now being offered on Bitfinex via another blockchain protocol for Bitcoin – the BlockStream Liquid Network sidechain. For those of you who don’t know, USDT has in the past been run on the Omni blockchain.
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