Why Does Tether Trade More Than Bitcoin Every Single Day?

Open any market dashboard and sort by 24-hour volume. Bitcoin is not at the top. Tether is, and usually by a wide margin: a recent reading showed roughly $31.4 billion of USDT changing hands against $20.3 billion of Bitcoin, with USDC third at $7.87 billion, ahead of Ethereum.

Three of the four most-traded assets in crypto are dollar tokens that are designed never to move in price. Once you understand why, you will read every volume number in this industry differently, and you will stop being impressed by most of them.

The short answer Stablecoins are not an asset most people buy. They are the currency people buy things with. In traditional markets, nobody reports the volume of dollars. When you buy a share of Apple, the trade is measured in shares, and the dollars are just the medium.

Crypto has no such convention. Every USDT that passes through a trade gets counted as USDT volume, so the medium of exchange shows up in the rankings alongside the things it is used to purchase.