With Bitcoin (BTC) ascending sharply in the last eight hours — over $9,100 at press time — U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin Tether (USDT) is on a minting spree. 

Whalebot Alerts has reported that Tether issued more than 160 million new coins in the last 24 hours in just two transactions. The first $60 million were minted when Bitcoin was valued at just over $8,000. A second transaction of $100 million USDT was issued just before BTC’s push past $8,500. 

At the same time, there has been significant USDT movement from whales between Binance and OKEx. In just under 12 hours, 91 million tokens were transferred from unknown wallets to the two exchanges, with the bulk — $85 million over two transactions — going to Binance. 

Only 22 million USDT was transferred out of the Tether Treasury.

Stablecoin without much stability

The Tether Treasury has been minting like mad since its creation, with nearly $7.8 billion in total USD assets. Though many suspected the firm’s seemingly flippant issuance of tokens — over one billion in the last month alone — may have been driving up other crypto prices, Cointelegraph has previously reported this type of market manipulation is unlikely.

However, USDT is still mired in controversy, with some arguing it shouldn’t be held for any length of time. The stigma may be partially due to a 2019 court case in which it was discovered the token could be backed up only 74% with fiat currency, rather than the near 1:1 ratio the stablecoin namesake implies.