Bitcoin rally, ETF inflows led to USDT market cap surge, says Tether CEO

There's a strong correlation between bitcoin surpassing $100,000 and USDT's market cap swelling in recent weeks, according to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino.

"Just in the last 20 days, Tether’s market cap grew around $16 billion," Ardoino said on Thursday during an interview at Emergence. "Part of it is due to the fact that there was a very important inflow into [spot bitcoin] ETFs," adding that Michael Saylor and "many others started to purchase bitcoin at a very fast pace, especially after the election."

Since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election a month ago, the price of bitcoin has been steadily rising before eclipsing $100,000 for the first time on Thursday morning. Leading up to the milestone, Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy has been purchasing bitcoin en masse while spot bitcoin ETFs like the one issued by Wall Street powerhouse BlackRock attracted heavy inflows .

MicroStrategy, co-founded by Saylor, holds 402,100 BTC. BlackRock’s IBIT spot bitcoin ETF has exceeded 500,000 BTC in assets under management less than a year after trading began.

'Injection of liquidity'

More investors gobbling up bitcoin and pouring capital into spot BTC exchange-traded funds in recent weeks has been net positive for Tether's USDT, the world's largest U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin.

"That required an injection of liquidity from the traditional financial world into the crypto trading world, and when there are these big inflows of liquidity, they end up being transformed into USDT, and that’s how our market cap grew so rapidly," said Ardoino.

With a total supply of over $140 billion, USDT is, by far, the world's most popular stablecoin. The total supply for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins recently surpassed $200 billion, according to The Block Data Dashboard .

The Block's first Emergence crypto conference is being held in Prague.