If I'm reading the settlement correctly, Bitfinex will now have even less USD to back Tethers, since they'll have to wire an $18,500,000 transfer to the State of New York.
Tether is over collateralized. If they paid that $18.5M from their collateral it would still be over collateralized by $145.9M
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
Tether claim to be over collateralized. This settlement contains numerous instances of Tether lying about their collateral situation. Why trust them without evidence at this point? They’re required to submit a report on their specific reserve holdings within 90 days. We’ll see then.
But if there are 34 billion tethers, $18 million is like a rounding error.