Jay Hao, CEO at OKEx, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, notes that the US dollar “drop” and the Bitcoin (BTC) surge recently occurred at the same time.
Hao points out that there’s been a regular downward adjustment of interest rates on US Treasury bonds along with historic quantitative easing policies.
He argues that these policies have resulted in many US dollars being sold, which has contributed to a decline in the dollar index. He reveals that recent data shows that the US dollar index has dropped below 93 – which is its lowest point in 2020 and also a two-year low.
Hao further notes that short positions in the US dollar derivatives market have reached new highs since April 2018.
He claims that global hedge funds are placing bets on a further decline of the US dollar: He reveals that the aggregate or total “bearish bet on USD rose by nearly $5.3 billion this week to reach $24.5 billion.”
He adds:
“From the perspective of correlation, the correlation between Bitcoin and US dollar, and gold and US dollar declined, while the correlation between Bitcoin and gold increased. The price reaction to this is that both gold and Bitcoin have seen skyrocketing against the backdrop of a falling US dollar index.”
He continued:
“The rise in gold can be explained by the fall in the US dollar which has increased global demand for safe-haven assets such as precious metals. Although Bitcoin may not have achieved safe-haven asset status just yet, it is another global alternative investment target besides gold. Moreover, when gold rises to people’s psychological highs, many of the US dollars that are still being continuously sold start to flow to Bitcoin and other digital currency markets.”
Hao notes that data from Coinmetrics reveals that the supply of Tether’s USDT stablecoin has been rising steadily, particularly in July 2020, when “the upward curve became steeper.” He adds that, at the same time, the upward momentum of gold slowed down during this same period, suggesting that more US dollars may be flowing into the crypto-asset market than before.
He also mentions that after these US dollars were converted to USDT, some of them inflowed to the digital asset exchanges. He revealed that the inflow of USDT into crypto exchanges surged by 282,539,130 USDT to 725,857.429 USDT on July 27, 2020 – which is notably the largest increase in one day or 24 hours since the past 143 days.
He points out that this is a large quantity of USDT that has been flowing into cryptocurrency exchanges, but Glassnode data reveals that digital currency exchanges’ USDT balances have been falling since April 2020.
Meanwhile, the overall Bitcoin (BTC) balance of virtual asset exchanges has been increasing steadily, Hao noted. Given these patterns, we can argue or speculate that the majority of USDT flowing into digital asset exchanges was used to acquire more Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, Hao claims.
He concludes:
“Looking at all the data, it seems pretty clear that Bitcoin’s rise this time around has been greatly affected by the U.S. dollar. It can be summarized as follows: The U.S. dollar index has fallen → the demand for hedging has increased → the price of gold has risen → the price of gold has reached a psychological high → investors start seeking other alternative investment products → the rate of USD minting as USDT has increased → more USDT flowing into exchanges → selling USDT and buying Bitcoin → exchanges’ Bitcoin balance rises and Bitcoin’s price rises.”
