Bitcoin’s price is up 21% since last week.

Some say that’s because of the new Wall Street crypto exchange and Blackrock’s spot bitcoin ETF proposal.

Did anybody look at what happened with TUSD stablecoin?

Looking for FUD in all the wrong places

While the total stablecoin market dropped last week, over 1 billion new TUSD tokens were minted out of nowhere on June 15–16, when Bitcoin’s price started its most recent pump from $25,000 to $30,000.

What an odd coincidence.

While anybody can mint TUSD, generally speaking, TUSD finds its largest usage in Asia, not the US. If a big US entity wanted to FOMO the news, they would either do it with cash or USDC, not TUSD.

On top of that, the estimated leverage ratio—a metric that looks at the amount of money traders borrow on exchanges relative to the total amount of Bitcoins available for buying and selling—went up sharply over that same time.

Fishy fishy.

Almost like somebody was trying to pump the markets to make a quick payday.

Twitter conspiracy theorists flagged unusual TUSD activity on Binance, too.

I can’t confirm that but it makes sense that whoever’s pumping the market does it on Binance. The exchange has the deepest order books and its management has a history of turning a blind eye to these types of shenanigans.

No gravedancing yet

Looks like we have some shady business going on behind the scenes. Nothing new for crypto.

Does that mean the pumpers will yank away the rug and crypto bears will get that massive, catastrophic crash they’re anticipating? Should we expect Tether will collapse or Binance will implode?

Maybe. Are you sure you want to bet on that?

As you can see in on-chain data that’s too much to put in this brief article, we just don’t have a lot of sellers right now.

That will change as prices go up or the “macro” changes. For now, accept the market as it is and plan accordingly.

The crypto market’s been known to explode from a little pumpage at just the right time. Sidelined capital rushes in and people waiting for that crash to $10,000 decide “$30k is good enough.” Next thing you know, we’re off to the races.

(Not a prediction, just something we’ve seen before in situations like these.)

Smooth sailing?

Certainly, with over 200,000 bitcoins in the hands of the US government and another 137,000 scheduled to hit the market in September as part of the Mt. Gox settlement, you may want to tamp down on your FOMO.

That’s not a lot of bitcoin but it can weigh down the market if it all gets sold too quickly.

You had more than a year to get a healthy allocation to crypto. You did! Now you can let the market go where it wants.

Tether is still a black hole and several important governments think Binance is a criminal enterprise. Exchanges can only pull shenanigans with stablecoins for so long until reality catches up with them.

It’s been that way for years, yet the market still has its moments of sunshine. Why do you think that has to change now?

There’s a difference between the entities trying to make money off of cryptocurrency, and the cryptocurrency itself. We’re investing in the crypto, not the entities.

But that’s a story for another day.

Today, we see a lot of excitement and new money coming into the market.

Just remember how this pump started, in case it ends sooner than you think.

Mark Helfman publishes the Crypto is Easy newsletter. He is also the author of three books and a top bitcoin writer on Medium and Hacker Noon. Learn more about him in his bio and connect with him on Superpeer or Tealfeed.