Tether (USDT) retains its top spot among stablecoins, ranking #3 overall with a 3.8% market dominance among cryptocurrencies. Tether is under scrutiny today following a Wall Street Journal article that states the stablecoin is being short sold by large hedge funds.

Trouble for Tether?

The article calls out the financial infrastructure of Tether and how it is not as transparent as some of the other competing tokens. This has been a complaint lodged against Tether for a while now, even going so far as to bring down a government investigation last year on the coin to determine where its backing comes from.

Tether has repeatedly come under fire for claiming it is backed 100% by US dollars, with many analysts questioning if that is really true. After the US government investigation, Tether’s backing sources were revealed to the investigators. The full details were not released to the public, but what was publicly declared showed that some of Tether’s backing comes from bonds and other commercial paper sources. Only 2.9% of Tether’s $82 billion is from US cash dollars.

Tether has managed to weather this storm and come out on the top of the stablecoin heap for now, but the new WSJ article draws fire back on the crypto token. This new scrutiny may not be enough to topple it from where it is at right now, but it could be enough to cast some doubt in its direction. We may see a drop in trade volume, though the actual dollar value of Tether isn’t likely to change.

Tether’s Pricing Stability

Tether is a true stablecoin, retaining a lot of its value from day to day and rarely fluctuating more than a couple of cents over the course of a day. Today’s Tether price is $1.00 (USDT/USD), which is a change of only $0.00003333 from yesterday. It is fairly common to see Tether only move that incrementally, which is why it is hailed as such a stable crypto. It works as a reserve coin for liquid currency, and many investors will move their crypto finances over to tether when the rest of the market is looking volatile but they don’t want to cash out yet.

Tether’s trade volume is up just 1.20% today, which brings it to $74 billion over the last 24 hours.