Tether has issued $300 million USDT tokens after almost two months of downtime. Related or not, the bitcoin price has surpassed $9,000.

After almost a two-month break, Tether printed $300 million USDT tokens. The emission took place on the Omni Explorer blockchain, although previously Tether announced it would move to the ERC-20 standard on the Ethereum blockchain. This is Tether's largest issue of tokens. The previous one took place on 23 January 2018.

Tether tokens are used on many of the world's largest crypto-exchanges as an alternative to the US dollar when trading in pairs with cryptocurrencies. Tether is a cryptocurrency supposedly pegged to the U.S. dollar. Experts fear that Tether issue unbacked tokens and use them in fraudulent manipulations of the bitcoin price. Last autumn, Tether announced a partnership with the audit firm Friedman LLP, which was supposed to confirm the consistency of Tether and verify that all issued tokens are backed with real bank deposits in US dollars, but a few months later Tether broke the agreement due to a too slow audit process.

At the end of January 2018, the study called Tether Report and carried out by anonymous authors were distributed in the network. The document noted that 48.7% of the bitcoin rate growth cases between 29 March 2017 and 4 January 2018 occurred within two hours after Tether issued its USDT tokens. On average, the price of bitcoin after the USDT emission grew by 6.5%.

But another statistical analysis carried out by the research fellow of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Alexander Ivanov, tried to prove the insolvency of this theory.

Meanwhile, the bitcoin rate exceeded $9,000. Within the last 24 hours, the bitcoin price increased by 6.7%. This level coincides with the results of the anonymous study, that claims that there is a direct connection between the Tether issuance and the bitcoin rate.