Tether’s Bitcoin Holdings Expand Amid Surplus Reserves

• Tether’s Bitcoin & Gold reserves saw light in the Q2 2023 transparency report.
• Reportedly, all the Bitcoin holding of Tether is seemingly stored in a single wallet.
• Tether holds a surplus of $3.3 billion reserve assets to support its stablecoins’ value.

Recent findings by renowned on-chain data analyst Tom Wan revealed that Tether, a blockchain-enabled platform, may harbour a significant reserve of Bitcoin, making it a formidable holder in the volatile world of cryptocurrencies. Based on Wan’s research, Tether’s Bitcoin holdings saw an increase of about $176 million over the last quarter, estimated at roughly 55,022 BTC, given the price as of June 30th. The recent jump in Tether’s Bitcoin reserve, estimated at $1.5 billion or approximately 53.49k BTC, marks a significant increase from the previous quarter.

It is crucial to remember when Wan speculated that Tether could be storing all its Bitcoin holdings in a single wallet. The wallet address (bc1qjasf9z3h7…) is the likely candidate, making it the 11th largest Bitcoin holder. Interestingly, according to him, the increase in the Bitcoin balance of this address over the quarters aligns with the quarterly balance increases of Tether.

Further underlining this supposition, it was noticed that inflow to the proposed wallet seems to originate solely from Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange closely linked with Tether. This address has been under Wan’s spotlight since his last quarter analysis and continues to show signs of growth in Bitcoin holdings. Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, reported on Monday in its Q2 attestation that the company has $3.3 billion of reserve assets over the necessary amount to back the value of its stablecoins.

Unfazed by the disclosure of Tether’s significant Bitcoin holdings, its market value remains stable, currently priced at $0.9989. This slight decrease of 0.01% sees its market capitalization sitting at around $83.81 billion over the last 24 hours. Data from CoinMarketCap shows that the trading volume has fallen by 14.76% to a solid $19.64 billion within the same period.

Contrastingly, Bitcoin is experiencing a modest rise of 0.26% over the past day, trading at an average price of $29,168.02. With this slight increase, Bitcoin’s market cap has also increased by 0.32%, bringing it to a staggering $567,245,670,268. Despite this increase, the 24-hour trading volume of Bitcoin has not followed suit, witnessing a considerable drop of 18.77% to $12,263,021,173.