The circulating supply of Tether’s USDT increased by 4.5 billion in November amid growing market optimism for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Blockchain intelligence platform Arkham confirmed this in a Nov. 28 post on X, noting that around $3 billion worth of USDT was minted on the Tron network.
Notably, a Kraken deposit address, “TQef1,” minted $2.5 billion of the stablecoin during the period.
USDT’s growth
Data from CryptoSlate shows that USDT’s supply has surged by around 35% since the beginning of the year to an all-time high of 89.35 billion as of press time.
During the past year, Tether has enjoyed enormous growth largely due to the struggles of its rivals like Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) and the Binance-backed BUSD stablecoin.
These issues have propelled USDT’s dominance over the stablecoin market to around 70%. More than 50% of Tether’s total supply is minted on Tron (TRX), while around 41% of its supply sits on Ethereum (ETH), according to data from DeFi Llama.
Meanwhile, market observers have suggested that Tether’s growing supply signals increased buying power on cryptocurrency exchanges.
In a recent note to investors, Markus Thielen, the head of research at Matrixport, stated the growth indicated that institutional investors could be shifting their fiat into stablecoin to convert them into other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Tether planning growth in other areas
Outside of its growing circulating supply, Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino hinted that the stablecoin issuer was building new products that would be launched next year as part of its expansion plans into new frontiers, according to a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Ardoino confirmed to CryptoSlate that the stablecoin issuer was leveraging the same technology that powers its stablecoins to build two disruptive projects on the fintech side. At the same time, the firm was also building products that “could obliterate some popular Web2 centralized services for good.”
He told CryptoSlate:
“Tether has co-founded and will heavily invest in its peer-to-peer technology called holepunch. It’s the first peer-to-peer, non-blockchain-based [tool] that allows for building web services without any central infrastructure. This means that tools like WhatsApp, Gmail, Google maps etc … can be built more efficiently [and] be more scalable while completely respecting the privacy of all users.”
