According to a latest report, an anonymous individual has transferred over 12 million Tether tokens to the crypto exchange Bitfinex. As a result, the trading volume of Tether has increased by around $12.9 million. Despite this fact, the exchange rate of the cryptocurrency remained unaffected at 0.24% within the last 24 hours.

This is not the first time that the treasury wallet has sent large magnitudes of tokens to the Bitfinex hot wallet. Similar injections of Tether have been reported earlier: $100 million USDT (September 2), 40 million (August 31), 30 million (August 29) and another $50 million (August 11), and few more in February and March.

The crypto critics have now raised their eyebrows over such transfers. They claim that Tether is manipulating the market by printing more currency when the market is at a low. Tether, is, therefore, allegedly breaking the value proposition of crypto.

Some crypto experts are surprised to witness such huge transactions being done by unknown persons. Yet, they are optimistic. They believe that such developments could have a positive impact on the crypto market and Bitcoin, even though they haven’t been that influential earlier. These transactions are worth 7% and 0.6% of the total Tether market cap respectively.

An interestingly point to be noted here is that Tether and Bitfinex have the same founders.

What is Tether?

Tether is a cryptocurrency backed up by the US dollar, which makes it a stable coin. Issued on the Bitcoin blockchain through the Omni Layer Protocol, Tether aligns its value to $1, no matter what’s happening in the market. The token, initially known as Realcoin, was opened to the market in 2014 by Brock Pierce, the founder of Tether. The token evolved to ease transactions between exchange platforms with a price similar or fixed to that of the US dollar, allowing traders to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities without resorting to banks.

Tether has witnessed a progressive growth since its inception. According to the latest statistical survey, during the summer of 2018, Tether accounted for up to 80% the trading volume of bitcoin. As of June 2018, Tether became the tenth largest cryptocurrency in market cap rankings.