Recognized as one of the leading stablecoins in the market, Tether (USDT) doesn’t appear to be having a good start in the New Year. On Monday, January 3rd, the stablecoin saw its value fall by 0.01%, as it hit $1. This was in direct contrast with the broader cryptocurrency market that was up on the same day by almost 2.15%. Currently, the stablecoin is trading at its midpoint of the last five days. This means that it is almost 0.20% off its five-day high, but is 0.20% higher of the five-day low of approximately $0.998043954372406. The stablecoin asset’s price is trading near support.
There is plenty of space available before it hits resistance because resistance is set at $1 and support is set at $0.999900357567609. Recently, USDT (Tether) has also been trading on low volumes. This means that the volume on January 3rd was lower than that of the last seven days. But, this is considered a temporary blow for the stablecoin because in the last week of 2021, Tether’s market capitalization had reached a value of almost $78.2 billion as per the data. In the month of December, Tether’s valuation had experienced a strong surge that has helped it in becoming the largest stablecoin in the market.
According to the statistics on coingecko.com about the top stablecoin by market capitalization, there were approximately 78.2 billion tether (USDT) tokens in circulation on December 30th, 2021. According to the transparency report by Tether Limited that had been published on the tether.to web portal, the total value of assets under management was about $78.5 billion. The latest metrics indicate that tether is around 3.35% of the total crypto economy, which is valued at $2.33 billion. As far as the stablecoin economy is concerned, its total value is around $168.3 billion and tether is now representing 46% of it.
During its lifetime, this particular stablecoin has experienced a massive amount of growth. For instance, the market capitalization of tether was around $451,600 on September 13th, 2015. Therefore, this increase in market capitalization to $78.2 billion is a massive one of about 17,327,227% to happen in a period of six years. The only stablecoin that comes even remotely close to the market valuation of tether is USD coin (USDC), which has a value of $42.1 billion. This was an increase of 9.7% from the month of November. 1.8% of the total market capitalization of $2.23 trillion is represented by USDC and it is just over half the size or 52.68% of the market valuation of tether.
When the two stablecoins are combined, they represent about 71.82% of the overall stablecoin economy and are around 5.15% of the overall crypto market economy of $2.23 trillion. There has been an increase in the market valuations of four stablecoin protocols that make up the top ten list. This increase has been between the ranges of 12.9% and 42.9%. Binance’s BUSD saw an increase of 12.9%, MIM jumped by 30.9%, Terra’s UST picked up by 34.2% and FRAX saw an increase of 42.9%. The overall valuation of tether is 39% larger than that of MIM, UST, BUSD and FRAX combined.
Not only is Tether the largest stablecoin in existence today, which is issued across numerous blockchains, it also commands the most trading volume. The 24 hour trading volume of Tether is more than the daily volume of Bitcoin, as there are more than $52.8 billion spent in USDT trades. Less than half of that volume can be found in the case of Bitcoin, which is around $25 million. While this makes Tether a strong investment and people are eager to check crypto broker reviews to start trading the stablecoin, it should be noted that there are some regulatory concerns.
There has been increased scrutiny in the case of the USD-backed stablecoin and many have expressed concerns that Tether is not backed by sufficient collateral, something they have attempted to remedy in order to reassure investors.
