They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Apparently, a Tether grant is worth 9 Billion US Dollars. At least the $100M grant on December 14, 2017 was. In less than 2 hours after The Tether Corporation “granted” $100M, the price of Bitcoin rose by over $600 per coin, or 4%, adding more than $9B to its market cap.
How does this compare to a randomly selected interval? On average, Bitcoin raises by about 20 cents in that period. That comes out to an average percentage gain that rounds to 0%.
On January 18, 2018, The Tether Report concluded that 48.8% of all Bitcoin’s price increases can be traced to within 2 hours of 93 Tether grants. The report is pretty scientific, but it’s a little hard to follow. So I’ve been trying to create something a little easier for the rest of us.
Here’s an example of how a Tether grant compares to a randomly selected point:
Tether Grant vs Random Time
The chart on the left shows a Tether grant. The midpoint is the time of the grant. For an interactive version of each Tether grant compared to a random time, check out The Tether Effect. The charts are scaled in terms of percentages so that you can see the difference in Tether grants (especially recently) compared to random times.
If you’re interested, I wrote A Brief History of BitCon — detailing the many cases of cryptocurrency related fraud.