The Tether blockchain-platform has recently issued an additional 70 million USDT tokens tied to the US dollar. It happens amid a sharp increase in demand for Tether tokens due to the cryptocurrency market decline.

The Tether Dollars (USDT) rate is “tied” to the US dollar. It is declared as a “digital version” of the dollar and is claimed to be traded at a ratio of 1 to 1. Many cryptocurrency exchanges use USDT instead of the US dollar, tying the bitcoin rate to it.

In theory, either BTC/USD or BTC/USDT are identical, because the USDT token is tied to the US dollar. But a few months ago, a bank trust in Taiwan, which supported the Tether platform, had problems with exchange operations due to regulation tightening in the US. As a result, users of USDT had problems with moving crypto-funds, and the token rate fell to $0.93.

With the recent correction of the cryptocurrency market, the demand for Tether tokens has increased significantly: traders use this token as an analogue of fiat to fix income and exit from cryptocurrency assets. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Tether has shown positive dynamics in recent days.

So, on 5 September, bitcoin fell 9% within the previous 24 hours, while Tether went up by 2%. Furthermore, Tether jumped to the fourth place in the CoinMarketCap ranking by daily trading volume with $427 million after bitcoin ($3.4 billion), Ethereum ($2.14 billion), Litecoin ($1.1 billion).

Apparently, the issue of additional 70 million Tether tokens is due to the lack of liquidity necessary for the market amid increased demand for the asset. The issuance of tokens was detected by the Omni Explorer service. Tether did no make any official statements.

Reddit users discussing the unannounced issue of Tether called this step a crypto quantitative easing, making an analogy with the actions of the central banks of the European Union and the United States, which by means of buying state bonds and other assets pour additional funds into the economy, in fact “printing money.”