Coinbase Premium Gap Hits -$107, Mostly A USDT Price Effect

A widely quoted Bitcoin indicator turned sharply negative this week, and the cause is simpler than the headline suggests. Cointelegraph reported on X that the Coinbase premium gap fell to -$107, citing a CryptoQuant analyst, and read it as selling pressure from US investors. A check against public price feeds finds a similar number. It also finds that almost all of the move comes from the price of Tether.

The Cointelegraph post on X that reported the -$107 reading, citing a CryptoQuant analyst. Source: Cointelegraph on X.

How the Coinbase premium gap is calculated

The gap is the Bitcoin price on Coinbase in dollars minus the Bitcoin price on Binance in Tether. When Coinbase trades above Binance the gap is positive. When it trades below, the gap is negative, and traders often read that as weaker demand among US buyers.

Public hourly candles for BTC-USD on Coinbase and BTCUSDT on Binance reproduce the reading. The gap sat around -$12 a day on average at the start of last week. It then widened day after day. By October 8 it was past minus sixty dollars, and on October 12 it reached about minus one hundred. The worst hour came that evening, a little beyond minus 115, and the reading stayed near minus 105 into October 13.

What the Tether price changes

Binance quotes Bitcoin in Tether, so its figure is a dollar price only if one Tether equals one dollar. At the moment it does not. On Coinbase, USDT-USD traded near 0.9987 on the morning of October 13, about 0.13% under par.

Take the live quotes from the morning of October 13. Binance's Tether price for Bitcoin looked about $111 higher than Coinbase's dollar price. A discount of 0.13% on a price of that size is roughly $106, so once Tether is valued properly the two venues sit within a few dollars of each other.

Tether against the dollar on a four-hour chart, as shown on TradingView. Chart by Samiran.

The chart tells the same story over time. Tether slipped from very close to par at the start of October down to the current level, and the Bitcoin gap widened across those same days.

The Coinbase premium gap with Tether priced in

Multiply each Binance hourly close by the Coinbase USDT-USD price at that hour, and the picture changes. In true dollars the Coinbase premium gap has averaged within a few dollars of zero every day since late September. No daily average, in either direction, was larger than about six dollars.

That leaves little for a US demand story to explain. A dollar gap near zero means Bitcoin costs about the same on both venues once Tether's price is counted. So the number in dollars shows no sign of the selling that the raw figure implies.

What this does and does not show

The raw reading is still a real number, and it matches what the analyst reported. Nothing here disputes it. The point is narrower and anyone with both price feeds can check it, which is that the whole widening tracks Tether's price. The data do not say why Tether trades slightly below $1. They show only that it does, so readers who follow this indicator may want to check Tether's price before drawing a conclusion from the gap.