Tether Treasury 2 Billion USDT Transfer to Whale: What is Going on?

A series of Tether USDT transactions worth $182 million have been transferred from Tether Treasury to a giant whale, according to transfer receipts from LookOnChain, a web3 data analysis tool.

In the post shared on X (formerly Twitter), LookOnChain reported that the recent transactions follow a slew of other transfers from Tether Treasury to the Whale. The data tracker noted that a flurry of transfers started in mid-October and has since continued into the new year.

With the latest transfer, the total transfer to the Whale has now totaled around $2 billion USDT. The transferred USDTs, which have since prompted speculation, have been deposited on the cryptocurrency trading platform Binance. Due to the size of the transactions, several crypto users speculate that the unknown whale could be an institutional investor.

Meanwhile, the recent transfers appear not to have affected the stablecoin’s peg to the dollar, with USDT still trading at $1 at press time. This was after USDT recorded a marginal 0.01% drop in price over the past 24 hours, data from CoinMarketCap reveals.

Tether’s dominance of the stablecoin market sustains itself, giving it a comfortable lead over its largest competitor, USD Coin (USDC). At press time, the overall market capitalization of USDC was estimated to be $24.79 billion, significantly less than USDT’s $92.1 billion.

In terms of trade volume in the past 24 hours, USDT has been the preferred stablecoin choice amongst investors, with over $52 billion recorded in that period. Conversely, USDC recorded $6.3 billion, while FDUSD also saw a volume of $3.5 billion.