Last Updated on August 4, 2023 by Bitfinsider

In a tweet on August 3, Ardoino stated that USDT is under pressure to decline by roughly 10 basis points, or 0.1%, or roughly $0.99. However, against expectations to the contrary, USDC, undoubtedly USDT’s major rival, is severely penalised while a brand-new rival “is getting it all.”

“Exactly! It feels definitely organic and not manipulative at all,”  Ardoino said with a snarky remark.

According to stablecoin statistics, Ardoino’s tweet was likely referring to a brand-new stablecoin called First Digital USD (FDUSD). This stablecoin’s market cap was only $20.25 million on August 2 before it had a sharp increase to its current market cap of $256.55 million, according to CoinMarketCap data that is available back to July 26.

The new stablecoin is currently the sixth stablecoin in terms of trading volume. The volume of FDUSD increased from over $620,000 at the beginning of August 2 to nearly $245 million by the end of the day.

In a Twitter discussion, financial analyst Adam Cochran added additional background. He claims that multiple on-chain addresses are trading USDT for DAI, and they are all supported by an address that receives hundreds of ETH from Binance.

He continued by saying that all of those addresses only had USDT entering and exiting, further indicating that the intention behind those actions is probably to put artificial market pressures on USDT. Around 100 days have passed since USDT began to be exchanged for DAI, and according to Cochran, “it seems like it might be the exchange itself, as its constantly under attack from spoof phishing attacks that target exchanges.”