Tether (USDT), the largest stablecoin by market cap, has given Bitcoin and the crypto market a little boost with the announcement of a monthly BTC-purchasing plan.

And it’s made it clear that it intends to use its realised profits to buy the asset, with an allocation of up to 15% of those monthly gains. “These Bitcoin shall be considered on top of the minimum reserves assets that 100% back tether tokens,” confirmed a Tether tweet yesterday.

This announcement comes after Tether, which issues the US$82.8 billion USDT stablecoin, reported US$1.48 billion of net profits in 2023 Q1.

The company, which is owned by a Hong Kong-based firm called iFinex (which also owns one of the oldest crypto exchanges, Bitfinex) also revealed it already has US$1.5 billion in BTC holdings.

“Tether anticipates that the current and future BTC holdings in its reserves will not exceed the Shareholder Capital Cushion and will further strengthen and diversify the reserves,” the firm clarified in a statement, adding that it will be taking self custody of the Bitcoin:

“While it is common practice among many institutional investors to third-party custody their Bitcoin, Tether believes in the philosophy “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin” and takes possession of the private keys associated with all of its Bitcoin holdings.”

Tether’s Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino explained the logic behind the move in a further lengthy tweet, writing:

“Why does Tether keep excess reserves in the portfolio? While these excess reserves are part of Tether own shareholder equity, Tether prefers to give priority to ensuring that its stablecoin products as resilient as possible.

“While banks can do fractional reserve, we believe that’s not a viable strategy for a stablecoin, so it’s crucial that Tether keeps an additional cushion to further protect its user base…

“Why Bitcoin and not something else? Because Bitcoin is the epitome of a sound and secure monetary system with its decentralized nature and scarcity, Bitcoin is revolutionizing the concept of money and challenging traditional finance.

“Bitcoin has defied expectations, shattered boundaries, and provides access to the global financial system to anyone with an internet connection.”

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.19 trillion, up about 1% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

The crypto market (apart from some newly invigorated metaverse tokens) was languishing late yesterday, but perhaps the Tether news is the rev up it, and Bitcoin more specifically, needed. It’s simply possible as well, however, that the market is following its usual path behind the US stock markets, which closed in the green overnight (AEST).

As our very own non-fungible Eddy Sunarto notes in his Market Highlights morning roundup…

“Overnight, major indexes Wall Street rose by over 1% as hopes grew the debt ceiling impasse could be resolved by the end of this week.

“JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon said US government will probably not default, while President Biden was confident there will be no default.”

Bitcoin has now reclaimed the US$27,200 mark after dropping to the mid US$26k range last night. Let’s see if it can hold it this time…

 

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$837 million) +20%

• Synthetix (SNX), (market cap: US$767 billion) +12%

• Optimism (OP), (market cap: US$604 million) +9%

• Axie Infinity (AXS), (market cap: US$850 million) +8%

• Injective (INJ), (market cap: US$530 million) +7%

 

PUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

• Rollbit Coin (RBT), (market cap: US$139 million) +42%

• Bob Token (BOB), (market cap: US$46 million) +37%

• Turbo (TURBO), (market cap: US$53 million) +31%

 

SLUMPERS

• Pepe (PEPE), (market cap: US$665 million) -4%

• Conflux (CFX), (mc: US$634 million) -4%

• Radix (XRD), (mc: US$760 million) -3%

 

SLUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

• Xen (XEN), (market cap: US$25 million) -15%

• ORDI (ORDI), (mc: US$308 million) -9%

• SuperVerse (SUPER), (mc: US$57 million) -5%

 

Around the blocks: BitBoy under fire

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

The massive crypto YouTube influencer BitBoy is copping flak (yet again) on Crypto Twitter for apparently selling a large amount of his tokens of the memecoin $BEN, which he and a pseudonymous Twitter account known as ben.eth have been tweeting about a great deal just lately.

This comes after the widely followed crypto influencer (1.46m YouTube subscribers, 1m on Twitter) indicated that he had no plans to sell the tokens for at least six months.

Let’s see BitBoy’s response to the furore, however…

Guess we’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out. In the meantime, it’s definitely still Buyer Beware season regarding all the memecoin froth.

Read MoreBitcoinCryptocurrency

You might be interested in