What's driving the price surge?
As for not having the money... [1] their own lawyers admitted in court they aren’t fully capitalized. At the time the article was written it has a measly $2.5B market cap (net of what the Fed’s seized, at least $350MM [2]). They had a bunch tied up in the separate scam that is Crypto Capital.
As for their banking relationship I believe after a few years of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego’s proceeds of money laundering (Taiwan, Poland, among others) their most recent statement was that it was at Deltec Bank in the Bahamas who is clearly on the up and up [3,4]
Let me ask you, can you with a straight face tell me this is a company legitimately holding eighteen billion dollars? And that two BILLION dollars a month in new money is rolling in like clockwork for a year and a half?
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrl...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/cointelegraph.com/news/bitfinex...
[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-02/bank-tied...
(NB: I'm not defending Tether, IMO there are way better stablecoins, like DAI, but I disagree about this bullrun being caused by it.)
“By mapping the blockchains of Bitcoin and Tether, we are able to establish that one large player on Bitfinex uses Tether to purchase large amounts of Bitcoin when prices are falling and following the printing of Tether. Such price supporting activities are successful as Bitcoin prices rise following the periods of intervention. Indeed, even 1% of the times with extreme exchange of Tether for Bitcoin have substantial aggregate price effects. The buying of Bitcoin with Tether also occurs more aggressively right below salient round‐number price thresholds where the price support might be most effective. Negative EOM price pressure on Bitcoin in months with large Tether issuance points to a month‐end need for dollar reserves for Tether, consistent with partial reserve backing. Our results are most consistent with the supply‐driven hypothesis.”
“Overall, our findings provide support for the view that price manipulation can have substantial distortive effects in cryptocurrencies. Prices in this market reflect much more than standard supply/demand and fundamental news. These distortive effects, when unwound, could have a considerable negative impact on cryptocurrency prices.”
They print tether, backed by nothing, which increases its market cap, and use it to buy Bitcoin which increases its price, which increases its market cap. Win-win! Haha. It’s like the accounting on arrested development — take a banana, take a buck.
Here is a Google Trend for "economic uncertainty", where nothing seems to have changed much except maybe little blip during Spring of 2020: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=economic...
Edit, found a link which actually does show heightened economic uncertainty: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USEPUINDXD perhaps contradicting myself.
For pump and dump schemes, aren't we past that stage for Bitcoin at least? Isn't Bitcoin too big and too "mainstream" to be pumped in some Telegraph channel? Maybe you can clarify what pump-and-dump strategy you think is being used here?
Can anyone definitely put their finger on what's causing price rise a global market like crypto? no
Can they do this probabilistically? perhaps.
Maisie Williams asked her 2.7M followers recently [1]: "should i go long on bitcoin"
Maybe that was a paid tweet, maybe not. 900k people answered in the poll still; and day after day it seems the mainstream is getting more and more exposed to it.
[1] https://twitter.com/Maisie_Williams/status/13287844990612234...