Tether Whale Addresses are on the Verge of Owning 80% of USDT

According to data from Santiment, the number of Tether addresses owning $1M plus is almost taking up 80% of USDT’s total supply in the last month. The trend, according to analysts, signifies a possible bullish trend for the cryptocurrency market at large.

USDT Tracking a Trajectory to Look Out for

As is the tendency in markets, the first one to meet the demand, is the first one to gain market dominance. This is what happened with Tether’s stablecoin, USDT, which was initially launched as RealCoin in July 2014 by Tether Limited in Hong Kong. Today,  USDT makes a lion’s share of total stablecoin supply, at 53% ($82 billion) of $143.1 billion.

According to a recently unveiled report, Tether has helped investors recover nearly $1.5 million in USDT that users had sent to wrong addresses since its dawn on the crypto market. The report states that Tether has a recovery mechanism in place that allows it to blacklist addresses on the Ethereum and Tron blockchains, freeze funds in those addresses, and issue new USDT tokens to affected users.

“Some users make mistakes when sending tokens to DeFi [decentralized finance] projects or trading platforms, which result in tokens being sent to smart contracts or addresses that do not have the functionality to recover the funds,” said Tether’s CTO Ardoino. 

A few weeks ago, Tether had announced that it had frozen about $150M in USDT, but they did not comment on why the action was taken. The startup, however, takes such actions upon suspicion that an address is involved in illegal activities or has obtained cash in an illegal way. In the wake of the recent cyber attacks executed on other networks, Tether could have employed the decision to freeze the accounts to counter a possible hack or slippage of funds on its network.

Overall Stablecoin’s Market prominence

However, due to doubts cast over Tether’s USD collateralization, more regulated stablecoins are gaining prominence. Among them is USD Coin (USDC), co-founded by Circle and Coinbase. Last August, under the umbrella of the CENTRE Consortium, the companies increased their USDC cash reserve in a bid to become the go-to stablecoin and dethrone Tether.

In the meantime, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had to slap Tether with a $41 million fine in October over its false claim that the stablecoin is fully backed by USD. The company’s shady tactics have continued since, failing to instill confidence among institutional investors.

For this reason, USDT has suffered a steady decline, going from 75% dominance at the beginning of 2021 to the present 53% stablecoin market share, ceding the ground to USDT. Most recently, USDT has even surpassed USDT on Ethereum, the largest DeFi ecosystem consisting of 2,912 dApps. The balance has now shifted to $40.36 billion (USDT) vs. $39.83 (USDT).

While this growth is impressive for Circle and Coinbase’s USDT stablecoin, when we zoom out, there is more to this picture than meets the eye.