318 wallets control 80% of USDT

Coin Metrics conducted a new study and found that approximately 300 wallets control 80% of all issued USDT tokens.

However, one should not immediately assume that these are some “whales” that control the market. Probably a significant part of the funds is placed on cryptocurrency exchanges, since on many USDT is the most liquid stablecoin. But tokens in fact belong to users who trade on these exchanges, and not to the sites themselves. Among the major Tether holders are brokerage firms that work with Chinese investors and high-frequency traders.

Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, John Griffin, believes that no more than a few large holders manage the token:

“The concentration of Tether suggests that it is at the disposal of several players capable of putting pressure on the bitcoin market. It also indicates that many stock players are interested in keeping the USDT afloat. ”

According to Coin Metrics, on the Binance Tether exchange it was used for 40% of all transactions, and on Huobi the indicator is up to 80%. Researchers analyzed USDT wallets based on OMNI and Ethereum, which contained more than 1 million tokens. A total of 318 such addresses were found.

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On the other hand, there is data from the BitInforCharts.com portal indicating that more than 20,000 bitcoin addresses contain BTC in the equivalent of more than $ 1 million. This may indicate the popularity of bitcoin as an asset for capital accumulation, while stablecoins are not displayed by users for limits of exchanges. That is why they are concentrated on a small number of addresses.

At the end of last month, it became known that Chinese merchants are actively using USDT to transfer cash from Russia to their homeland. This was reported
head of one over-the-counter cryptocurrency platform. According to him, many Chinese importers are bought by stablecoin, and then send it to China.