Tether climbs up into the 4th spot on CM, as BCH slides...

The 4th most valuable crypto project in all of crypto, isn't even really a crypto.

At least not in the truest sense.

It is a dollar pegged stablecoin.

Tether added close to $2 billion in market cap over the past several days, which was enough for it to leapfrog BCH for the 4th most valuable spot.

This gave it a total market cap value of over $6 billion.

Check it out:

(Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/)

This is interesting for a couple reasons...

The first being that there has been a lot of talk recently about governments around the world about to unveil some sort of heavy handed regulation as it relates to stable coins.

And it's no wonder really, they are now accounting for the vast majority of crypto volume.

Take tether for example, just looking at today's volume, it has done more volume than another other crypto on the planet...

And that includes bitcoin...

By a wide margin...

Check it out:

(Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/)

That is a lot money moving through tether, and remember this is just one of many stablecoins.

USDC and a couple others have also become very popular.

Initially there was concern that stablecoins would be banned due to fears surrounding money laundering etc, but as of now it looks more likely that they will try to regulate them to death, which may end up having a similar impact, we will see.

The other reason it is interesting is because BCH has just recently lost close to a billion in market cap, mostly related to its block reward halving.

Last week BCH was the first of the bitcoins to have its block reward halving, and the result was not good news for BCH investors.

Miners turned off their machines, hashrate plummeted, and the price of the BCH coin dropped.

This made it all the more easy for tether to move ahead of it on coinmarketcap.com.

Two ways to look at all this money hanging out in stablecoins...

In my opinion, there are two ways to look at all the volume and money parked in stablecoins.

On the one hand, it is a little disheartening that crypto's main use case (transferring value easily that can also transcend borders) is starting to drift away from true crypto projects.

It looks like people that are using crypto for that, are much more comfortable using stablecoins as opposed to actual cryptocurrencies, which like I said, is not really great news for the industry as a whole.

However, there is also the line of thinking that with all that money already sitting in the crypto ecosystem, it can be viewed as a powder keg of sorts.

If bitcoin were to start running there is already billions of dollars sitting in stablecoins that could easily make their way into bitcoin or other crypto projects and really send them skywards should the situation present itself.

I guess it all depends on how you look at things.

Hopefully if these stablecoin regulations do start to come out, that the money doesn't leave crypto, and instead starts using bitcoin and some of the other more traditional crypto projects.

Though, that may just be me dreaming a bit.

Stay informed my friends.

-Doc