Tether loses 251,350 Ethereum-based USDT wallets in 11 days

More than a quarter-million Ethereum-based USDT wallets vanished in less than two weeks. Analytics firm Santiment flagged the contraction, which saw non-empty wallet counts fall by 251,350 over an 11-day stretch, marking one of the steepest declines in Tether holder activity on Ethereum in recent memory. Santiment’s data captured a particularly intense 48-hour window within that 11-day period, during which non-empty Ethereum USDT wallets fell by 72,841 addresses. That’s roughly a 0.54% decline in a metric that almost never moves backward. Ethereum still hosts approximately 13.46 million USDT holders, and the stablecoin’s market cap on the network sits around $96.1 billion. Santiment interprets the decline as a capitulation signal, meaning smaller holders are closing out their positions or consolidating funds. The firm draws a parallel to a similar episode from December 2024. Between December 19 and December 31 of that year, Ethereum saw a comparable drop in non-empty USDT addresses. What followed was a nearly 10% rally in Bitcoin’s price. Address consolidation is another factor. Users and services routinely merge balances from multiple wallets into fewer, larger ones, which can def...