Tether Close to Overtaking Litecoin in Market Cap

Just $400 million now stands between tether and litecoin after months of selling during which tether’s market cap has only known up.

After overtaking Cardano following a printing of $300 million this August, tether is now close to taking seventh position out of all cryptocurrencies and tokens.

Cardano has now fallen by another half a billion, almost giving way to monero. While tron was $14 billion once, now just about a billion, making it a 93% drop within nine months.

During those months tether has only known up. Brief blips in market cap decreases soon followed not only by a complete V recovery, but also by more tethers in addition.

About half a billion new tethers have been printed this year, with the centralized currency known to at times handle double its market cap in trading volumes.

On or around September the 5th, for example, tether’s trading volumes ballooned to five billion. Now they’re at $2.4 billion, almost all of its market cap.

That doesn’t necessarily mean nearly every single tether is being traded every day as one tether can be traded ten times or more, but it does mean this has an astonishing velocity.

Bitcoin’s trading volumes, for example, are just 3% of its market cap, falling below the usual $4 billion recently. Eth’s trading volumes are at around 7%. While for XRP, it’s at just 1%. Tether’s trading volumes, in contrast, stand at some 90%.

In fact they stand at about 25% of all global crypto trading volumes which currently handled $10 billion in combination during the past 24 hours.

Much of this trading volumes is not even counted either because the exchange has no trading fees or because it encourages pointless trading by rewarding traders with exchange tokens known as transaction mining.

Most trading volumes of all types are for bitcoin, with ethereum also having quite a few USDT markets, seemingly followed by EOS and then Dash for today.

Coinmarketcap counts 400 tether trading pairs on different exchanges across the globe, with the controversial centralized dollar token used for arbitrage, in crypto only exchanges, and generally for trading.

The company however has produced no audit, so it is difficult to know whether these tokens are actually dollar backed. Yet whether they are or otherwise, this may be, at least on the surface and at least for now, one of the most successfully crypto of 2018.