Tether Treasury Continues Printing Spree By Minting 180M USDT

Tether has made a move that’s one of two things, and that depends on who you ask. Either the company is trying to push up Bitcoin’s price, or they’re trying to meet a rapid surge in demand. Either way, the Treasury of one of the world’s most popular stablecoins has been incredibly active within the past few days. Today stands as no exception.

Minting 180 Million USDT

Today, Tether’s Treasury enacted yet another “inventory replenish,” minting another 180 million USDT. This comes from Paolo Arduino, the CTO of Bitfinex. As it stands now, the minting process was done through two separate transactions.

💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 💵 120,000,000 #USDT (119,642,371 USD) minted at Tether Treasury

Tx: https://t.co/KKucn9sLIr

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) March 24, 2020

While the minting of a stablecoin in and of itself is rather inconsequential in terms of price movement, the timing itself has been grounds of suspicion. Stablecoins across the world have started to become extremely active ever since Bitcoin dropped like a stone, losing 40% in value on the 12th of March. All of these stablecoins have been minting new coins ever since.

As one would imagine, one of the biggest stablecoins in the market had the Treasury take the lead in the sheer volume of minting. Back on the 20th of March, 2020, Tether had issued out a staggering 240 million in USDT, having done so in just under three days. The numbers have only grown since then.

Mixed Reactions

The response to the fresh influx of USDT has been somewhat mixed as a whole. Some took this information as a prediction that the Bitcoin would start to rise higher, while others saw it as an exact opposite, foreseeing trying times. The entire event felt a lot like the Federal Reserve’s habit of pushing out USD when the going gets tough. This, of course, isn’t something that the crypto industry is keen on mimicking, for the most part, at least.

Doing Itself No Favours

A key concern among the crypto industry is the fact that Tether is unaudited for the most part. Back in September of last year, Tether’s co-founder rather foolishly stated that it didn’t really matter if an equal amount of USD backed the USDT coin. Why someone who founded such a successful company would say this, is best left not to figure out.

Controversies surrounding Tether had become a pretty common occurrence. In the infamous Paradise Papers, Tether was mentioned to be linked to the Bitfinex exchange. While the relationship was publically denied, it was one of the open secrets of the time. As it stands now, they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore, officially acknowledging the connection between them. This, in and of itself, has been mentioned in a lawsuit that was filed against Tether back in October last year.