A strong round of buys hit the market this weekend as unsubstantiated rumors began to circle surrounding Tether and Bitfinex’s potential insolvency. I won’t be going into the details surrounding the allegations because, like I said, they are nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors. However, the effects of the rumors did not go unnoticed.Tether, a stablecoin and dollar-backed token, began to stack up a sizable premium from its normal 1:1, dollar-to-tether market rate. This deviation in price began to run massive premiums between Bitfinex and other large crypto exchanges. At one point, the price of bitcoin on Bitfinex hit a high of $7,800 while barely breaking $6,700 on most other exchanges. At the time of this article, the premium, although still modest, has closed significantly. The trend difference between Bitfinex and other exchanges tells a very different story than those of Coinbase, Gemini and Bitstamp:Figure 1: BTC-USD, 12-Hour Candles, Bitfinex Premium and Break of DowntrendOne huge difference between Bitfinex and other exchanges is this clear and decisive break of the multi-month downtrend that has governed the market dynamic for the last 10 months. Currently, Bitfinex is consolidating outside this downtrend and saw the largest daily volume that its BTC-USD market has traded in over 6 months. However, if we take a look at Bitstamp, for example, we see a very different story:Figure 2: BTC-USD, D...
