With Bitcoin (BTC) ascending sharply in the last eight hours — over $nine,100 at press time — U.South. dollar-backed stablecoin Tether (USDT) is on a minting spree.

Whalebot Alerts has reported that Tether issued more than 160 one thousand thousand new coins in the final 24 hours in simply two transactions. The commencement $60 million were minted when Bitcoin was valued at simply over $eight,000. A second transaction of $100 million USDT was issued but before BTC'due south push past $8,500.

At the aforementioned time, there has been meaning USDT movement from whales between Binance and OKEx. In just nether 12 hours, 91 million tokens were transferred from unknown wallets to the two exchanges, with the bulk — $85 1000000 over two transactions — going to Binance.

Only 22 million USDT was transferred out of the Tether Treasury.

Stablecoin without much stability

The Tether Treasury has been minting like mad since its cosmos, with nearly $7.8 billion in full USD assets. Though many suspected the business firm's seemingly brassy issuance of tokens — over one billion in the last month lonely — may have been driving upwardly other crypto prices, Cointelegraph has previously reported this type of market manipulation is unlikely.

However, USDT is still mired in controversy, with some arguing it shouldn't exist held for any length of time. The stigma may exist partially due to a 2022 court case in which it was discovered the token could be backed up only 74% with fiat currency, rather than the near 1:ane ratio the stablecoin namesake implies.