Tether and Bitcoin: David vs. Goliath – A Match Made in Hades?

Colleagues, Bitcoin without doubt is the poster children for cryptocurrencies. Despite its flaws and dramatic price decrease, since December 2017 it commands some 51% market share of the $209B global cryptocurrency value based data from CoinMarketCap. By all accounts Tether is a third-tier Stablecoin pegged to the US dollar … currently trading at 0.985 cents to the greenback. Tether does rank as the eighth largest cryptocurrency by weighted market cap with a little over 2B tokens in circulation. The central issue is whether Tether has been used to manipulate the value of Bitcoin – a $2B fiat-back Stablecoin influencing the industry leading BTC weighing in at $112B market cap. In a paper released by a University of Texas professor entitled Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? The report makes a compelling case that “Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin.” A bevy of articles by respected publications including the New York Times, CCN, Coin Telegraph, Coin Desk and CryptoSlate appear to validate the U of T statistical thesis of Dr. John Griffin. The unanswered question concerns motive. We will explore this issue further and report our conclusions. Post a comment today! Lawrence – Cryptocurrency Academy (https://cryptocurrencyacademy.blogspot.com/)