The reason for the bitcoin rate hike was the large-scale issuance of Tether

Tether, the issuer of the largest-stablecoin by capitalization, has issued 540 million new USDT tokens over the past seven days.

During that time it has risen nearly 20%, testing highs over the past year above $11,300.

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino explained that these transactions are driven by the need to replenish USDT reserves to meet future investor demand.

"This is an authorized but not executed transaction. These assets will be used to support release requests over the next period," he wrote.

According to Tether's official data, USDT issuance recently exceeded 10 billion units. According to Tether's website, the total value of USDT assets, including pending tokens, is now $10.6 billion, of which 6.28 billion are issued on the Ethereum blockchain, ttrcoin writes.

USDT is also the most traded asset on the market. According to CoinMarketCap, USDT's trading volume over the last 24 hours exceeded $34 billion, while bitcoin's corresponding figure was $25.6 billion.

Earlier, Messari analyst Ryan Watkins spoke about the possible loss of bitcoin's leadership in this indicator due to the active use and growing popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi).

In June, the cumulative value transferred in stablecoins surpassed that of bitcoin for the first time. The growing popularity of stablecoins has already raised concerns with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

Recall, earlier Tether has been repeatedly accused of market manipulation. According to Bloomberg, in 70% cases, Tether's issuance coincided with bitcoin growth.

"It is very likely that stablecoins will soon attract the close attention of regulators. If bitcoin was a "project in itself", and its value, which soared to $20K, was easy enough to cut in times, then steblecoins are already playing on the territory of central banks and the global money transfer network," notes the FxPro team of analysts.