It may be surprising for Bitcoin enthusiasts that largest crypto asset by market cap is not the mostly widely used cryptocurrency in the world, but according to some data providers, this is fact and Tether is the world’s most widely used crypto asset.
According to the statistics provided by CoinMarketCAP, the highest daily and monthly trading volume of Tether is higher than that of Bitcoin despite having a market cap 30 time less than BTC. Tether volume surpassed Bitcoin for the first time in April and has consistently exceeded it since early August at about $21 billion per day, the data provider says.
According to the report, it is the most important stablecoin in crypto ecosystem as its trading volume is about 18 percent higher than that of Bitcoin and because of Tether regulators around the globe are considering cryptocurrencies a danger to existing traditional financial ecosystem.
Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle, said that Tether was used in 40% and 80% of all transaction made in Binance and Huobi Global respectively, according to Coin Metrics earlier this year.
Lex Sokolin, global financial technology co-head at ConsenSys, about the Tether, said:
“If there is no Tether, we lose a massive amount of daily volume — around $1 billion or more depending on the data source. Some of the concerning potential patters of trading in the market may start to fall away.”
Thaddeus Dryja, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said that many people don’t even know they use Tether. The reason is that crypto exchanges don’t have access to bank accounts to hold dollars on behalf of customers as traditional financial institutions are not satisfied with Anti-money laundering measures of crypto exchanges. So they use Tether as a substitute. He said:
“I don’t think people actually trust Tether. I think people use Tether without realizing that they are using it, and instead think they have actual dollars in a bank account somewhere.”
