After the downfall of USDC, the USDT emerged as the unmatchable winner among all stablecoins. Recently, 1 billion USDT was minted on the Ethereum blockchain. This is perhaps one of the largest mints of the stablecoin, ever.
Around 09:40 pm UTC, The Tether Treasury minted 1 billion USDT coins on the Ethereum blockchain. Here is the hash of the same. This is perhaps the largest ever USDT volume minted by Tether Treasury. Interestingly, the cost of minting 1,000,995,559 USDT was just $25.72
Two years ago, in Jan 2021, Tether had also minted two billion USDT, but it was over one week. There was also an incident when Tether Treasury had minted five billion USDT at once.
Tether's Chief Technical Officer, Paolo Ardoino, clarified in a Tweet that this mint would not be issued immediately but would be used as inventory for the next period of issuance requests.
Earlier, Ardoino gave an estimated $700 million in profit during the December quarter of 2022. The total reserves and the $700 million reserves stood at $1.66 Billion, which gave Tether the room to mint the current 1 billion stablecoins.
In the last three months, the dominance of USDT rose considerably from $70.51 billion to $82.3 billion—a rise of 17% in its market cap. Please note that the fully diluted market cap is $85 billion.
According to the data from CoinMarket Cap and Blockworks.co, and Trading View, USDT now accounts for 7.06% of the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies. And, Tether now dominates 63% of the stablecoin market cap.
The principal reason for the emergence of Tether and its stablecoin as the sole winner among stablecoins was the fall of USDC caused by the Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, which held 10% of the total USDC supply. You can witness a sharp fall in market cap around 10 March 2023.
It is also necessary to note that BUSD also suffered considerable losses. it lost around $10 billion in market cap within the last three months. The primary reasons behind its fall can be attributed to regulatory actions from the CFTC.
The highest volume of USDT is present in Tron Blockchain(45.1 billion) and not Ethereum(36.2 billion). However, Ethereum hosts the highest amount of Dapps, Liquidity Protocols, and DeFi solutions among all blockchains. This brings the necessity to increase its allocation in Ethereum in view of a recovery in crypto markets.