The price started getting pumped up by Tether, and now it's managed by Alameda and Cumberland in cooperation with Tether. USDT volume is 50% higher than the sum of BTC and ETH volume. The price you see, $42500 or whatever, that's not USD. That's USDT. If you control the printing of the currency, and you buy shit with it, you can absolutely set it to whatever you want. [1]

To quote Bitfinex right before they fired up the Tether printer:

  BTC could tank to below 1k if we don't act quickly

So no, I'm not surprised by the price. The action dragged in a few profiteering hedge funds.

[1] https://cryptonews.com/news/how-merlin-lost-patience-trying-...

From the cited article, that quote was Bitfinex to one of their banks not processing fiat redemption requests (so people could not withdraw money from Bitfinex). Of course, prolonged bouts of that would've reduced trust in crypto and exchanges, reasonably so.

Not evident what that has to do with the Tether printer?

And btw, do you have any links on the hedge fund connection, and Alameda and Cumberland?

> Not evident what that has to do with the Tether printer?

Shortly after that exchange, they realized they could just take the money out of the Tether bank account, and use it to satisfy their withdrawal requests. I speculate this is the moment they realized that they did not have to actually back their USDT, and turned on the printer.

> Of course, prolonged bouts of that would've reduced trust in crypto and exchanges, reasonably so.

I think that is a completely reasonable alternative explanation.

> And btw, do you have any links on the hedge fund connection, and Alameda and Cumberland?

Check this out. Protos did the legwork to figure out where all the USDT issuances were going. Of $96B in outbound distributions to market makers, $36B went to Alameda and $24B went to Cumberland. That's almost 70% of all distributions ever made to large accounts.

[1] https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...

Does anyone know what that does to inflation?

Iirc the btc/eth market caps are more than the amount of "printed" USD throughout the pandemic.

Does tether printed act the same on inflation as USD printed?