Recently, Tether, the operator of the largest USDT stablecoin, issued an additional 1 billion Tether tokens (USDT) on the Tron blockchain. This move increased the total capitalization of USDT to more than $96 billion.

Paolo Ardoino, the head of Tether, announced that the new tokens were created for the purpose of "restocking". He stressed that these tokens will be used for future requests to purchase USDT from the company and for inter-network conversions.

Since the beginning of 2018, Tether has been issuing new USDT tokens in advance, even before funds are received to secure them. This is done to speed up the process, and the issue goes immediately in large volume, and then they are put into circulation as requests from users and exchanges appear.

In the same way, USDT is burned in large volumes when users are transferred to fiat.

It should be noted that Tether issued 5 billion USDT in just a week, which raised the capitalization of this stablecoin above 96 billion dollars. This compares with the capitalization of a competitor, the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin from Circle, which is $25.6 billion.

The total capitalization of all stablecoins, according to DeFiLlama, now exceeds $135 billion. The Tron network ranks second in terms of stablecoin issuance, with a market share of 37.7%. TRC-20 USDT tokens on the Tron blockchain are popular due to fast transaction processing and low fees.

Analysts at CryptoQuant have noticed that since the end of 2022, the turnover of USDT has increased by about $ 30 billion. Each increase in supply coincided with the beginning of a rise in the price of bitcoin, which led to interesting observations about the correlation between these two events.