Three-quarters of all Tether owned by just 318 addresses

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Tether ownership is worryingly concentrated, citing Coin Metrics data that showed just 318 addresses held 80 percent of all Tether in circulation.

Coin Metrics data shows Tether ownership highly concentrated.

Tether, a stablecoin created to provide liquidity to cryptocurrency exchanges, hasn't been a stranger to controversy.

Now, recent Coin Metrics research found that the cryptocurrency was much more concentrated than originally thought-the data showed that only around 300 entities control around 80 percent of all Tether currently in circulation.

John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told Bloomberg that this concentration of Tether suggests that control of Tether is in the hands of a few central players.

Griffin echoed the statement, saying the dramatic surge Bitcoin's price saw in 2017 was a direct result of market manipulation by Tether.

Bloomberg's piece didn't manage to raise any alarms, as dozens of Twitter users commented on the article, saying that kind of concentration was expected from Tether.

Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream, said that Tether's primary use case is exchange trading and that the exchanges that hold large amounts of USDT also have millions of active users.

Ofc most of tether is in exchanges - it's use case is exchange traders! the tether volume and bitcoin volume being close $9-10bil/day shows the use case also.

Coin Metrics found that Tether was used in 40 and 80 percent of all transactions on Binance and Huobi, respectively.

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