| > Tether is supposedly... > Tether minting seems... > The story goes... This is all very hand-wavey. Never concrete statements. The minting happens at the portal (eg Binance). There's no sense for an exchange to mint a liability without collateral. I gave an example of liquidations resulting in new Tether. I don't know what you count as a spike, but liquidations happen all the time. The exchanges report liquidations publicly. A lot happened recently with BTC's move up. You can also see open interest increase or decrease on liquidations depending on if a short or long position is liquidated. Again, those contracts are settled in Tether, so it would make sense for Tether market cap to increase on asset price increases. There are also funding requirements at different times. The more people short a contract, the more they pay to their counter-party until they close the position. Same is true for longs. One side or the other are incentivized with higher or lower rates to keep the contract in line with spot price. This is an ongoing cost. It fluctuates throughout the day. It's a well known signal to watch stablecoin market caps as a ratio of total crypto market cap - (USDC+USDT)/Total. This ratio is currently at the midpoint. Leverage increasing means stablecoin MC increases. Leverage decreasing, means stablecoin MC decreases. It doesn't go down 100%. You will see it trend up. Here are a couple examples I quickly found: https://twitter.com/WClementeIII/status/1552380899857235969 https://twitter.com/chestbrook/status/1513150205973118981 > they take the Tethers and buy BTC Even when it was down 77% from its high in Nov. 2021, people were saying this. Still down 64%. Of all the assets in the world Tether could buy with their "IOUs", I don't know why people keep saying they're buying BTC. I don't know where this idea came from, or how it possibly makes sense. FYI - USDC market cap increased more than USDT in 2022. Where are the "Circle is buying BTC with IOUs" conspiracies? |