Bitcoin Hits New 2018 Low While Tether USDT Reached The 4th Biggest Cap

TL;DR

• Bitcoin (BTC) continues to lose value, and its current price is getting closer to test the $3,000 area.
• Tether (USDT) has made a surprising comeback in the last month, thanks to the dumping altcoins.
• At the time of writing, USDT is the fourth largest cryptocurrency.

The crypto market situation continues its usual bearish trend as 2018 approaches its end. While many were hoping for an end of the year’s rally, that would spark a new bull run and bring Bitcoin back to over five digits value, it appears that the market will remain bearish until the very end of the year.

Analysts and experts agree that the situation is quite severe at this point. So much so, in fact, that Bitcoin (BTC) value managed to drop to new lows, which were not witnessed since August 2017. While still the largest coin by market cap, Bitcoin’s value has dropped to $3,130 (Bitstamp) at the time of writing.

Despite this, the coin is the most dominant force in the market, with its total market cap ($55.9 billion) amounting to more than half of the entire crypto market’s cap ($101.2 billion). Almost the entire crypto market continues to trade in the red, with few coins within the top 100 being able to experience a slight increase.

The rise of Tether

Another proof of the severity of the bear market is the rise of Tether (USDT), a controversial stablecoin that has managed to overtake Stellar’s (XLM) position as the fourth largest coin by market cap.

Tether currently has a market cap of $1.8 billion. Only a week ago, it needed over $400 million to reach Stellar. Now, however, it overtook its place on the list, due to the drop in Stellar’s own market cap.

Tether was at the center of a large controversy several months ago. Many believed that the stablecoin will disappear after it failed to prove that it can back its coins with an adequate amount of USD. Additional allegations of attempts at market manipulation further damaged its reputation.

However, with the market crash that started on November 15th following BCH hard fork, the crypto markets started losing value, and most coins were affected. Tether, however, was not, and it actually started rising through the coinmarketcap ranks. At the beginning of the year, USDT held the rank of 15 on the list of largest cryptocurrencies. Since then, it was a center of a controversy and it experienced an oversale, but it still managed to recover and climb near the top of the list.

As with all dollar-backed stablecoins, the value of USDT is at $1, which indicates that the coin finally managed to stabilize. It appears that its advancement will be halted at the fourth spot, as its next obstacle, Ethereum, currently has a market cap of nearly $8.7 billion. Whether Tether can rise further up depends solely on Ethereum’s own situation, and whether or not its market cap will continue to spiral fall.