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Reputable data analyst fires back at "wild theories" about Tether reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The co-founder of crypto data and insights firm Coin Metrics has fired back at yet another article in mainstream media claiming that the âBitcoin bubbleâ has been driven by Tether.
Nic Carter, a former Fidelity crypto asset analyst and Castle Island Ventures partner, slammed the Wall Street Journal article titled âBehind the Bitcoin Bubbleâ by Andy Kessler, alleging that it verged on âjournalistic malpracticeâ.
âNormally, if you are a columnist writing in one of the most respected financial publications, you might try and evaluate the data behind that claim, instead of just uncritically accepting it. But Mr. Kessler did no such thing. He just blindly repeated a fanciful claim from an anonymous blogger in order to imply that Bitcoinâs price was somehow dependent on Tether.â
The award-winning WSJ writer based some of his fairly extensive criticism on the work of a blogger called âCryptoAnonâ in a viral post called âThe Bit Short: Inside Cryptoâs Doomsday Machineâ. Kessler wrote the blogger had "found that as much as two-thirds of Bitcoin buys on any given day were purchased with Tether" based on CoinLib data.
Raising questions over Tether and its lack of audits and the idea USDT was being employed to buy Bitcoin to "jack up its price," Kessler added;
âNormally I wouldnât care. Bitcoin is nothing, itâs vapor, a concept of an idea. Transactions using Bitcoin are few and far between. Itâs not a store of valueâanything that drops 30% in a week canât play that role.â
Kessler said he must also note that "wallet provider Coinbase, the largest holder of Bitcoin, says it 'does not support USDT.' Do they know something? (Coinbase offers its own stablecoin USDC, in partnership with Circle.)
Carter, who is now board chair at Coin Metrics, wrote that assessing trade between USDT and Bitcoin using data called CoinLib was âindefensibleâ as it included tens of billions of wash trading data from exchanges that reputable data sources ignore.
He said any serious trader knows that âmany of the exchanges composing the CoinLib sample are not credible, and that the resultant data was thus completely unreliable.â
âAs I will demonstrate, this data is not sufficient to make the case that Bitcoin liquidity is dominated by Tether, and relying on it is liable to mislead. Unfortunately, the mainstream financial press is now amplifying these erroneous claims.â
Carter stated that CoinLib is taking the data outputs from marginal and often non-fiat connected Tether based exchanges as face value, and âunsophisticated analysts like CryptoAnonâ are using it to disseminate FUD about Bitcoinâs liquidity.
He argued that highly regulated exchanges and institutional fund providers do not rely on or even support Tether in some cases and they all facilitate an on-ramp to Bitcoin and support the price.
âOther entities like Cash App, Paxos, Paypal, BlockFi, Robinhood, Bitwise, and Grayscale all facilitate various forms of exposure to Bitcoin and are connected to the commercial bank system and in some cases publicly-traded companies. No Tether present.â
Carter concludes that Kessler needs more research and called for a retraction and a correction by the WSJ:
âWild theories relying on data that everyone in the crypto industry knows to be erroneous do no one any good.â
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