I don't know about you, but when I woke up this morning, the markets were red red red. I looked at my Robinhood notifications and thought "No, that can't be right. There's no way Ethereum is $141..."
Wait. WHAT?
Ethereum was $140. Bitcoin was $5000.
"Oh, it must be some kind of FUD," I thought. "I wonder if it's China FUD or Tether FUD?"
Well, as most of you already know, this time it was Tether FUD.
This is a great pic from this article from one of the many times our old friend Tether Fudd has decided to pay us an unannounced visit.
Stay calm. It's not a big deal. This has happened before and will happen again. Sure, USDT is not the most straight-forward transparent stablecoin out there. And neither is the USD currency. Both USD and USDT derive their value from 3 sources: 1) their abundant supply, 2) their nearly universal acceptance (almost all crypto exchanges have USDT), and 3) their unparalleled dispersion throughout the world.
And none of that is affected by a little FUD generated by the ruling of the financial regulator of a single state in Murica. In fact, one has to wonder what kind of sway a New York state regulator really has over Bitfinex and Tether, which are both owned and operated by iFinex Inc., a company which is headquartered in Hong Kong and registered in the British Virgin Islands. I'm pretty sure Americans are not allowed to trade on Bitfinex, so this all seems a lot a whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. That's why crypto traders have learned to ...
ALWAYS BUY TETHER FUD #ABTF
Case in point: Quantfury, a startup platform that provides unmatched trading conditions for currently mostly crypto traders across all asset classes - think BitMEX and eToro crossed with Robinhood - has never had a day with more than $20 million in trading volume. You see, they don't allow bot trading via APIs so it's a great proxy for true trader sentiment in the cryptoverse. And today, which pretty much began with an opening salvo by Tether Fudd, the platform is seeing almost $27 million in volume today. That's more than double their average daily volume for the past week and approximately 35% higher than their all-time trading volume high.
Apparently the traders on their platform subscribe to ABTF as well.
Another aspect to think about is that stablecoins are an industry unto themselves at this point. In this regard, I think Messari has it right. They have removed the stablecoins from their Coinmarketcap-style league table and placed them in their own Stablecoin Index. It's kind of beautiful. Right now they only list 8 stablecoins with a combined market cap of $3.59 billion.
From a supply perspective, USDT makes up about 80% of the supply. But from a trading perspective, USDT is involved in 96.3% of all stablecoin trades. That is quite a massive headstart in this emerging industry. Tether FUD is a way to give the TUSD, USDC, PAX, GUSD, and DAI's of the world a chance to maybe pick up some of that market share. Does the fact that GUSD's parent company Gemini is located in New York City matter? Maybe, maybe not. But I don't think that fact can be ignored either.
That leaves us with the simple maxim, #ABTF.
One that we can repeat whenever we hear charges like this in the future. #ABTF.
One that can comfort us whenever we wake up in the middle of the night and our Blockfolio screams red, red, red!
#ABTF #ABTF #ABTF
Always Buy Tether FUD.
Remember this and you'll be fine.