As per updated data from onchain researchers at Santiment, Tether wallet addresses valued at $1 million or more, hold 80% of the entire USDT supply.
With the total market cap of all stablecoins at around $160 billion at the time of writing, Tether (USDT) remains the largest stablecoin, enjoying almost 50% of the market share. The coin’s current market capitalization of $77.98 billion, is higher than all other stablecoins, giving it a 3.79% representation in the $2 trillion global crypto economy. USDT is also placed third on the leaderboard, after Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), as one of the three largest cryptocurrencies in the world.
However, what’s worth noting is that as per a new analysis, and based on data sourced from onchain researchers at Santiment, stablecoin whales own 80% of the entire USDT supply. These whales are essentially USDT wallet addresses, valued at $1 million or higher. Santiment recently tweeted that crypto whales owning a large majority of USDT actually bodes well for its long-term prospects.
At the time of writing this report, Santiment’s metrics reveal USDT addresses worth $1 million owning 79.89% of the circulating 77,926,851,088 USDT.
Source: Santiment
On the other hand, data from Into the Block, a prominent AI-based crypto analysis firm, indicates that the concentration of large USDT holders stands at 45% today. Additionally, figures shared by CoinCarp, another popular crypto market data analysis firm, reveal that there are 4.4 million ETH addresses that own USDT, with the top 10 holders owning 28.01% of the entire ERC20 Tethers in circulation, and the Top 100 controlling 47.46% of the supply.
Why this trend?
Although there are close to $179 billion worth of crypto coins pegged to fiat currencies in the market today, these stablecoins aren’t as liquid as suggested by the circulation metrics, especially if we talk about the concentration of large holders.
As DeFi and stablecoin liquidity pools became mainstream over the past few years, a large number of stablecoin owners have chosen to simply hold onto their coins, owing to their low volatility and ability to deliver an impressive APY (Annual Percentage Yield) of up to 18%, and in some cases even higher.
On a side note, we recently reported a story on Tether’s CTO Paolo Ardoino going on record to state that they have helped recover $87 million worth of USDT till date, sent to wrong addresses by its users.
