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Huobi Lists New Stablecoins Amidst Tether Sell-Off

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Exchange Huobi Stablecoin Tether

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Fredrik Vold

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Fredrik Vold

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Last updated:

June 26, 2023

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Huobi Global, the international version of one of the earliest Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that it will list four new stablecoins on its platform as alternatives to the controversial Tether (USDT) token.

The new stablecoins are Paxos Standard (PAX), TrueUSD (TUSD), USDCoin (USDC), and Gemini Dollar (GUSD). Huobi said it will open up for deposits in these tokens starting on Friday, October 19.

The move by Huobi follows days of dramatic price swings for the popular USD-pegged cryptocurrency Tether. The stablecoin, which is supposed to be backed 1-to-1 by physical US dollars in reserves, seemingly lost the connection to the dollar this week, trading all the way down to USD 0.86 at one point on Monday. Since then, however, Tether has recovered and is currently trading at 97 cents.

The Tether sell-off led to a huge inflow of money into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on Tether-based crypto exchanges such as Bitfinex. As of Wednesday morning, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are still trading at a large premium on Bitfinex and HitBTC compared to its price on fiat-based exchanges like Coinbase.

Some exchanges allow their customers to exchange cryptocurrencies for US dollars, however others including Bitfinex, Bittrex, HitBTC, and Poloniex offer USDT. Because Tethers are riskier than actual US dollars, the market attaches a risk premium to them by demanding more Tethers than USD in exchange for a Bitcoin.

For example, a website untether.space tracks this discrepancy, which it represents as a “risk premium”.

Stablecoin market growing

As Cryptonews.com has reported on earlier, the market for so-called stablecoins is currently seeing strong growth, with a number of new tokens being introduced to the market. Among the best-known is the Ethereum-based and USD-pegged TrueUSD (TUSD), and USD//Coin (USDC), a new token created by the Goldman Sachs-backed crypto start-up Circle. Both tokens are among the new stablecoins that will now be tradable on Huobi Global.

In either case, scepticism towards stablecoins remains. For example, Sam Doctor, managing director and head of data science research at Fundstrat, told Bloomberg that he wouldn’t keep his money in stablecoins as “There’s a big disconnect between the concept and the implementation right now.” In addition, Gil Luria, director of research at D.A. Davidson & Co., stressed the risks related to the centralization of stablecoins (teams could run away with funds), while a government can decide to freeze the assets.
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