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Comment by joebob42 | Hacker News Reader

does this explosion impact the broader crypto marker particularly? I know some of these platforms are interconnected in weird ways but don't know much about it.

And is there any sensible world where it stabilizes at some value other than 0 or 1?

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Tether (USDT) is the largest "stablecoin" and the most interesting one here. Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) have a combined market cap of ~120. The total "stablecoin" market cap is ~170B. UST was at ~18B before the collapse, so it does account around 10% of the market. Significant, but not the most important player.

Lehman Brothers was "not the most important player" and yet, look what its failure triggered.

USDT has a circulating supply much greater than its market cap

> does this explosion impact the broader crypto marker particularly?

Yes, if a lot of btc is bought in this stable coin, and the stable coin is printed, to buy btc in order to pump up the btc price then if that stable coin loses its peg, it cannot be used to pump btc anymore. When Tether finally dies it'll take down btc and the whole industry with it

This particular crash doesn't seem to have impacted btc prices though.

Although BTC has been trending downwards with most of the rest of the financial markets this week.

It has definitely impacted the BTC price. A ton of BTC was quickly sold off in order to try and support UST.

You're referring to Tether (USDT), which has indeed been suspected of being printed to prop up BTC. This is about TerraUSD (UST).

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