Many Major Stablecoins Take a Brief Plunge Below USD 0.9

Source: Adobe/James Thew

In the vast sea of red currently seen in the crypto market, one section particularly stands out: the sudden and brief drop in a number major stablecoins at approximately the same time, before bouncing back. (Updated at 14:14 UTC with a comment from Tether.)

At 13:30 UTC, major cryptocurrencies are bleeding, and the top 10 by market capitalization are seeing losses between bitcoin (BTC)’s 23% and binance coin (BNB)’s 43% in the last day alone.

Among these, the 4th coin by market capitalization and a major stablecoin, tether (USDT), fell 4% in a day, and 3.4% in the last hour, currently standing at USD 0.97.

This comes after a swift and massive, though short-lasting dip to USD 0.89, surprising the Cryptoverse at large. Similarly, in October of 2018, USDT tested USD 0.86.

“USDT is not ‘losing’ its peg,“ Stuart Hoegner, General Counsel at Bitfinex and Tether, told Cryptonews.com.

“Subject to our terms of service, Tether issues and redeems one USDT for one dollar: no more, no less. This is irrespective of market conditions,” he said, adding that many people are “flooding into USDT as a safe harbor.”

“On Bitfinex and Kraken, the market price closely reflects the tether to the dollar on USDT and, on Coinbase, USDT is at a premium. Sites tracking pricing and providing analysis should be approached with caution as they use exchanges as data sources, many of which were unreachable during the dip,” he stressed.

In either case, USDT wasn’t alone in this plunge today.

USD coin (USDC), currently ranked 9th by CoinGecko, dropped 8% in a day and 9% in the last hour. While it’s now trading at USD 0.92, this too is a recovery from a dip to USD 0.89.

And quite a few other stablecoins turned red on the site’s list, including:

Binance USD (BUSD), went down 7% in a day, and 9% in an hour, dipping to USD 0.9, now standing at USD 0.94;
DAI is down 7% in a day and 8% in an hour, touching USD 0.92;
Gemini Dollar (GUSD) plunged briefly to USD 0.82, or 6% in a day and 3% in an hour, but now trading at USD 0.94;
TrueUSD (TUSD), however, is green in all time frames, currently trading at USD 1.04 – though it too dropped to USD 0.88, quickly bouncing back;
Paxos Standard (PAX) is indeed in red (4% in a day), trading at USD 0.96, but its chart does not show the same sudden drop as the others.

This development, though brief, didn’t escape the Cryptoverse’s eye.