You can do it directly on FTX, or you can do it on ethereum by borrowing tether on aave against, say, USDC, and then selling it for USDC.
You can do this in significant size, 8 figures+ if you'd like.
If Tether goes completely bust, it's likely that closely associated exchanges won't be able to cover the bets.
Until that happens, they control all the levers and can just move the market as necessary to make you lose your bet.
Also don't understand what moving the market means in this context. The market is at 1:1 for USDT/USD, if there's selling pressure that would lead USDT to trade under $1, the only way to manipulate that is to buy lots of USDT from everyone who wants to sell, which tends to support the peg. Not even sure why that's called manipulation. If there's a real panic and tether turns off withdrawals there's no way anyone has the money to buy everything up at peg.
I’m no expert, but wouldn’t this be unrealizable?
If tether were to fall it’s not crazy to think it would take with it most exchanges, given how most of them use USDT for maintaining operations.
I’ve just given up on crypto at this point. I’m a big proponent in “invest in things you can understand”, and crypto is a space where very little people really understand what’s going.
You can call that FUD if you want, but not acknowledging that crypto is a wild, wild west with a lot of shady corners, will set you up for a big reckoning at some point.
How many people understand the US banking system? What a bank is allowed to do with your $, how inter-bank payments are settled; how a bank secures its records; under what circumstances a bank might lose its records; what recourse you have in the case that your bank loses your records or makes what you believe is a mistake… yet everyone gives money to their bank.
2012 Bitcoin was great: it takes all of an hour to understand the entire protocol, the act of building/installing bitcoind shows you the entire surface area, and everyone interacting with it understood as much about it as you did. Contrasted to the substantially more opaque banking system, where most people don’t understand it, but trust it due to the test of time.
2021 crypto is indeed different. Now it’s approaching similar complexity to the existing banking system. But do I still understand it better than banking? For the low-level abstractions: BTC, ETH, etc: absolutely — especially so now that we’ve seen them fork and understand the hypotheticals there better. Higher-layer social protocols like NFTs… maybe not. So I stay away from those. Crypto gives you optionality that existing digital investments completely fail at. So that’s nice from your “invest only in what you understand” perspective, right?
FTX in particular has standard coin/USD pairs and also USDT pairs. No reason that USDT collapsing would cause FTX to go bust. Alameda and other market makers might lose a ton if they didn't see it coming.
The same ability is spinning up for sushiswap as well if you don't want have any exposure to other assets blowing up and threatening the collateral you care about.
Not if you're a US citizen