According to a recent interview that Bloomberg held with Coin Metrics, more than 80% of all available USD Tether in circulation is currently owned and traded by around 300 entities.
Bloomberg mentions that this is much more concentrated than with Bitcoin as data has shown that $1 million worth of BTC is diversified over 20,000 accounts, meaning that on average, a regular account from those 20,000 contains only $50 worth of BTC on average.
However, if we were to calculate for the USDT one of the accounts from the 300 cited would contain at least $10 million worth of the token.
The USDT has already been a part of major controversy where traders couldn’t tell what the token was pegged to. The founders were saying that the coin is guaranteed by fiat and therefore will not move above or below the $1 price mark, but later they claimed that it was pegged to liquid currency and various other traditional assets.
Several analysts are saying that most of those 300 addresses belong to companies catering to the Chinese market, as it’s where most of the demand is. Many of them fear that such a tight concentration of mo than $3.2 billion’s worth of cryptocurrency could severely affect the overall crypto market, especially Bitcoin should these holders decide that it’s time to make huge swings.
Knowing institutional investors, if they’re aware of the influence they can have on the market, they may start to manipulate it to their advantage, but this is nothing but speculation.
