People often don't realize how supporting Tether is to this ecosystem. It's practically the only way capital is somewhat forced to stay and be re-used at a later point, all because most of the entities holding that token don't want to have anything to do with Bitfinex. It's literally capital waiting to be put in action, which is why Tether is definitely going to boost any sort of upward momentum in the forthcoming years.
The only way for this market to make Tether less relevant, is to have 'genuine' parties launch their own stablecoin, or have actual fiat pairs gain more dominance.
And that is a big no! We are going to change from Zimbabwe dollars to Bolivars. Any crypto that is issued by somebody promising it is stable against something will end up bad one day.
I'm amazed also how people tend to minimize the effect of some driving factors behind the volume in cryptos. They say tether has no effect they do claim that BTC would not be influenced by a banking ban (lol, especially since the news with Zebay). People are starting to forget it's not 2010 anymore when you had 1000 guys doing trades.
The whole crypto business is becoming a more and more complex environment and if any of the main driving force behind this will sneeze everyone will feel it.
And, I'm surprised by this, as I went to check USDT volume...Almost the same as ETH, EOS and XRP combined. . Yeah...irrelevant ....