If people believe in USDT then it's the same as USD almost. There's far more than 2.5bn of USD being held across the globe so 2.5bn isn't really surprising. Many may leave USDT in their accounts in order to capitalize on short term volatility that they would not be able to do so if trying to use fiat because of the delays involved. Given that the whole market cap is 200bn it means only a little over 1% is in Tether at any one time, personally i don't feel that is too much at all.
People fail to understand that USDT quantity is not marketcap. And they keep on calculating ratios between USDT quantity and marketcap.
USDT is supposedly pegged to USD, 1:1, stable coin.
Ratios should be calculated between USDT quantity and the inflow of FIAT money in the crypto world, which is as I said, roughly 6B$ for a marketcap of 300B$.
So, 2.5B USDT out of 6B$ inflow, how does this ratio sound to you?
I didn't think of it in such a way before, however my immediate thought would be that a similar thing applies to tether. Just because there is a circulating supply of 2.5bn does that mean that at all times 2.5bn of it is on the market, would that not be the case also?