The traditional financial and banking sector is on the verge of a technological Cold War between China and the United States. In the meantime, the crypto become more and more attractive to investors worldwide. This is the case with one of the most controversial cryptocurrency projects on the market – the stablecoin Tether, which is becoming a resort for financial investments for the traditional fiat investors.
In a recent report published by Coin Metrics, 80% of the 4,095,057,493 circulating Tether (USDTs) is being divided into 318 wallet addresses. A very large proportion accounting for 3.3 billion USDT tokens is in possession of large investors, each of whom has USDTs with over $1 million in value.
The analysis and reports data that were released by Coin Metrics about Ethereum and OMNI blockchains indicates that USDT ownership can be even more concentrated. This is due to the possibility of a single user holding several wallet addresses.
John Griffin, professor in finance at the University of Texas, strongly believes that there are a few large players that could manipulate the Tether and Bitcoin prices. Both of the currencies can be affected, because USDT is used as a currency for exchanging Bitcoins by the majority of crypto exchanges. Some market specialists refer to exchanges as the “Tether Mafia”.
As opposed to Tether, Bitcoin`s distribution across accounts is at a larger scale. More than 20,000 unique Bitcoin addresses hold over $1 million each, given Bitcoin’s price of $11,832.68 as of press time.
As CryptoBrowser, Tether is the main driving force in Bitcoin transactions, with two of the most prominent crypto exchanges Binance and Huobi using the Tether for 40% and 80% of their transactions, respectively.
Apart from exchanges like Binance, Huobi, and Bitfinex (Bitfinex being also a major owner of Tether), other big players include brokerage companies, targeted at Chinese investors who seek alternatives to the falling Chinese Yuan.
The concentration of Tether could bring massive volatility to the $300 billion crypto market, resulting in another crypto winter, repeating the scenario from 2018.