That's a bit of a mischaracterization. The 75% that they're describing as "Cash & Cash Equivalents" might be similar to money market funds in composition, but we can't know whether it is or not because they don't give any details about the commercial paper. They don't even make the claim that it's asset-backed. Because they aren't saying anything about that, and they're not audited, they could very well be making riskier bets.

But more importantly, there's the 25% of their funds that bears absolutely no resemblance to anything a money market fund would do. The quote the FT article publishes from Martin Walker looks pretty reasonable to me:

> It is pretty clear looking at the makeup of the reserves — a tiny proportion of the reserves are cash on account at banks — that Tether is operating like a bank but with none of the normal disclosure.

> They are creating a dollar substitute and basically running a banking and payments business but without the oversight that anyone else doing a similar kind of business would have.