Can USDT’s market cap sail Tether’s boat through the ongoing market turmoil

The USDT transaction volume reached a new high over the last four months according to Glassnode’s latest tweet posted on 7 November. With multiple factors in favor of USDT, it appears that the stablecoin may not be losing its dominance anytime soon.

You can’t win them all

Despite reaching a four-month high in terms of volume, USDT wasn’t able to compete with other stablecoins. As can be seen from the image below, USDT ranked third in terms of transfer volume. Furthermore, the transfer volume occupied 13.6% of the overall stablecoin space. Stablecoins such as USDC and DAI managed to dominte this domain.

Source: Dune Analytics

However, USDT’s network growth showed a different image across different networks. As can be seen from the image below, network growth on Ethereum (Blue) and Optimism (Red) declined over the past month. This indicated that the frequency with which USDT was being exchanged across addresses on these networks reduced. 

However USDT’s network growth managed to witness an uptick during the same period on the Arbitrum (Yellow).

Source: Santiment

USDT managed to maintain some calm as there was an improvement in the active addresses count. Over the past 30 days, the active address count increased by 14%.

Even though the activity for USDT had increased, whales started to lose interest in the stablecoin. According to data provided by Messari, the number of addresses holding more than $1 million USDT had declined by 7.55% in the last 30 days.

USDT at crossroads

Despite losing interest from large addresses, the stablecoin still managed to be one of the most used smart contracts by Ethereum whales. According to WhaleStats, a crypto whale movement tracking platform ,USDT ranked 6 in terms of the most used smart contracts by the top 2000 Ethereum whales.

Source: Messari

The interest in USDT weathered in centralized exchanges as well. USDT held on exchanges such as Bitfinex, Binance and FTX declined over the past few months. However, USDT holders on OKX, continued to grow and show faith in the stablecoin.

Source: Dune Analytics

Despite the ups and downs being faced by USDT, it still remained the top stablecoin in terms of market cap according to CoinMarketCap. At press time, its overall market cap stood at $69 million and its volume had appreciated by 30.50% in the last 24 hours.