Bitcoin off slightly; stablecoin Tether regains footing, but losing popularity
Tether trades back toward $1 but investors explore buying other stablecoins
Bitcoin, the world’s largest digital currency, is showing small losses, with a single bitcoin BTCUSD, -0.62% last going for $6,446.49, down 0.6% over the past 24 hours.
Coming off a week in which Tether, the most popular stablecoin, broke its peg to the buck, investors in the U.S. dollar-backed cryptocurrency have begun packing up shop for more stable options. A stablecoin is meant to be precisely that, stable. Most stablecoins trade at or around $1, often gravitating between 99 cents and $1.01. “For traders, the instability of Tether provides an interesting conundrum of whether to opt into other more regulated stablecoin options such as Gemini dollars, Circle dollars or TrueUSD, which offer the same 1:1 to U.S. dollar option to Tether, but with more apparent robustness and security,” wrote Aditya Das, economist at Brave New Coin, a blockchain and crypto asset market data company.“Liquidity and availability have likely been Tether’s greatest driver of value and popularity, but with a new number of stablecoin options tradable on major exchanges like Huobi and Okex, the stablecoin flippening may continue to unfold.”
