Price discovery happens in a market. Wherever most of an asset’s trade volume is happening, that’s probably what’s doing most of the work to determine the price. Billions of fake dollars can pump BTC even more easily than real dollars.
The highest volume bitcoin exchange is still Binance, which you’ll remember is also a recently criminally convicted conspiracy — just what you want for a trustworthy asset.
First Digital USD (FDUSD) is a relatively new stablecoin. It was introduced onto Binance in June 2023, after Binance lost its solid footing with long-time partner Tether and its own stablecoin, BUSD, was shut down in early 2023. The total issuance of FDUSD is 3 billion.
There’s $2-3 billion volume each day of bitcoin spot ETF trading — but Binance BTC-FDUSD does $11.5 billion a day and Binance BTC-USDT does over $6 billion a day. The stablecoins account for 22% of total bitcoin spot trading volume. [CoinGecko; Binance; CoinGecko]
Trading volumes between bitcoin and these two stablecoins alone swamp the trading volume of all the ETFs.
We know that USDT is being printed out of thin air and sent out as a “loan,” and that “loan” is claimed to be the reserve backing the issuance of the tethers. FDUSD is similarly created by an opaque process — First Digital claims full US dollar backing for all FDUSD, but we flatly do not believe them.
DesoGames on Twitter thinks it will all end in tears. He’s pretty sure that FDUSD is the next Terra-Luna. “The current price of Bitcoin is not real because the biggest pair on the biggest exchange in crypto is fraudulent; and that pair happens to be Bitcoin/FDUSD.” [Twitter thread]
What could you do to the bitcoin price if you could casually print 13 billion pseudo-dollars? {read}