If anyone benefited from the collapse of cryptocurrencies last week, these are stablecoins, which turned out to be the most popular asset among investors.

While cryptocurrency market dives deep into the crisis, collapsing after bitcoin sharply fell in price, stablecoins pegged to the US dollar are an island of calm and safety for investors. On 12 March, Tether, the issuer of the most popular stablecoin in the crypto world, reported that the market capitalization of its coins exceeded $5 billion amid growing interest “in the most stable, liquid and wealthy currency in the cryptocurrency market.”

Within several days before 12 March, Tether had already noticed growing investors' demand for its stablecoin and issued more than $500 million in USDT in response to it.

USDT is the coin #1 by the daily trading volume, which exceeds even the volume of bitcoin trading. According to CoinMarketCap, within the last 24 hours, transactions with USDT worth $57.5 billion were made on cryptocurrency exchanges. For comparison: over the same period, the volume of bitcoin trading amounted to $45.4 billion, while Ethereum just exceeded $15 billion in trading volume. Other cryptocurrencies from the top 10 by capitalization did not reach even the $5 billion level of daily trading volume.

Stablecoins are often seen as a safe haven during periods of high volatility in the cryptocurrency market. They are widely used as an asset to save value due to their price attachment. Most stablecoins are pegged to the price of US dollar.