Tether Reports Record $2.85B Profit as Biggest Stablecoin Nears $100B Market Cap
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
A strange development. But if they do they're sitting on one of the most profitable business on earth: emit a currency that doesn't pay interest, to the tune of tens of billions (and soon more than a hundred billion), and rake in the US treasuries yeld.
BTW we don't hear much on the subject from Centre (Coinbase+Circle consortium emitting the USDC stable coin). Coinbase gives a yeld on the USDC stored at Coinbase itself but they don't give it to USDC not stored at Coinbase. At 26 billion USDC circulating, this seems to be quite the business model too.
Tether is well aware, then, that they have credibility claims to resolve. Otherwise, why would you authorize your bank to make statements at conferences about your AUM?
However, that is more refreshing than the Deltec side of things (are they still the predominant bank for Tether?). Their Deputy CEO[1] has made the following farcical claims:
- when people challenged money movement being largely than the entirety reported by The Bahamas, he said "well, that's related to a different banking license than what we have". When asked about the two banking licenses issued there, he couldn't remember the name of either of them. And wasn't sure if they had both, or just one of them... the Deputy CEO of the bank doesn't know what banking licenses they operate under...
- he made comments that he could see individual transactions in Bitfinex and correlate them against their bank accounts. Kinda odd access for your bank to have...
[1] Their Deputy CEO at the time was 33. His LinkedIn claimed that he was simultaneously an asset manager at his own firm, "Indepedance[sic] Weath[sic] Management" in Jacksonville, FL, a Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon, a position which he gained immediately after getting his M.S. from HEC Lausanne in 2001, which, with simple arithmetic says he graduated with his Masters when he was ... 15. (And then became a 15 yo Professor?) AND the Deputy CEO of Deltec. Multitasking like Musk.
PS: After a disastrous series of interviews, the bank removed his profile from their website. After people started pointing out how suspicious that looked in light of everything at the time (their "attestation, not audit" and "We've had an audit but we can't show it to you because it's in Chinese" farces), they added him back to the site, then took the site down entirely a week later and replaced it with a barely modified WordPress template site with no functioning links. And in the process they went from a "50 year old bank" to "operating for over 70 years", in the space of two weeks.
Also entirely "hilarious" on the website now...
Website is still WordPress...
Online Banking is BS. Any combination of user/password will immediately respond "Invalid". I'm going to guess that's because that's exactly what the JS is coded to say because the login URI is 403 for everybody.
Bitfinex might be getting more legit. Deltec still looks as shady as it ever did, if not worse.
That aside it's hard to see what the crypto community is so in love with here. This is - at best - an opaque, trusted, centralized dollar derivative whose leadership refuses to actually verify their holdings. They also have the ability to randomly freeze coins without due process -- and they do! Even more so than other stablecoin issuers. Far more than Circle. And they cooperate with the US government, allegedly.
Their main differentiator appears to be running a PayPal for pig butchering scams in Cambodia, and they seem to be antithetical to everything crypto stands for.
No idea why we're even giving this story the time of day, it's the same baseless claims they've been making the whole time but with marginally higher numbers. Let's revisit this when they actually post an audit.
It is easy to see what the crypto community is so in love here.
They provide a way for traders, globally, to sit in "dollars", they bought up a whole bunch of bitcoin for what is now super cheap (and they are a large holder) [0], and are now reaping in the profits from that and their US bonds. The longer that rates stay high, the more money they make.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/01/18/tether-purchased...
Long-dated bonds go down in price when interest rates go up, as our friends at SVB learned. So the bonds they claimed to have years ago should be significantly under face value on their books. Unless they're the world's greatest hammock-based trading team.
The question is why wouldn't the crypto community embrace USDC over USDT where they have actual, verified deposits, and a redemption process? And why is it always so much to ask for an audit?
You know if they produced an audit from an actual auditor who didn't run away from them (like last time) I'd believe them, right?
They got rid of their long dated papers [0].
Because the crypto community is FAR bigger outside of the US and those people don't want the US to have direct control over their funds. This line is bluring now that USDT is starting to enforce blacklists.
[0] https://blockworks.co/news/tether-says-usdt-stablecoin-now-b...
Which they would have had to take a loss on, so where is that loss? See what I mean?
Either they're the world's greatest traders, or something doesn't add up. And it's not like they have a sterling reputation for honesty.
Again, this would be very easy for them to clear up, by just hiring an auditor. Not that big an ask for 1/10th of a trillion dollars under management.
Agreed that they could and should be more transparent.
Disagree that they should just go out of business or that they are horrible people just because they exist and don't play the game the way you want it played.
Multiple people involved have lied multiple times, materially, about their business operations. Not just "lack of candor" or transparency, but active deception.
Reducing that to "don't play the game the way you want it played" is facile.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...
Maybe pump the brakes on the martyrdom.
I’d like nothing more than to see Jamie Dimon face consequences for some of the things he and his organization have been a part of.
Whataboutism isn’t an intellectually honest argument.
Advocate away. Wanting something better doesn't mean you get to do all sorts of stupid shit and not get called on it. It doesn't immunize against criticism.
And it's entirely debatable and subjective that the world of Tether and Bitfinex are "something better", so please don't act like that's unadulterated facts.
I don’t know what the truth is obviously for sure but this story is extremely possible and plausible. It doesn’t mean they were particularly good traders. It means if true basically they were disciplined and didn’t trade at all and are now benefitting from massive upside on their set up resulting from monetary policy and regulatory conditions driving their popularity.
That is, excuse the phrasing, a metric fuckton of discipline that most people on the planet would find hard to exercise. At one point, their minting of Tether implied they were banking half a billion dollars a day.
They sat on that from $6B 2 years ago to a claimed $80B now?
Still no audit, though. Just "attestations". The difference is the attestation just says "at one moment in time, this much money was in accounts". You could get a short term loan (remember how Bitfinex and Tether used to pretend that they were independent, until people asked why parties A, B, C were the same parties A, B, C on each side of their loan contracts when they borrowed?).
You and I can't buy a house on a mere attestation of accounts - funnily enough, lenders want to see how we acquired that money. But these clowns can stand on stage at Davos and say "Yeah, we've banked a billion a week for the last two years, trust us, you don't need an audit". I know that comparing investment to revenue is not apples-to-apples, but to get an idea of what that incoming cash looks like? You're on the scale of Saudi Aramco. Samsung. Alphabet.
What amuses me a bit is how shocked it can seem to people for them to “sit” on 80 bn dollars. It’s literally what they’re supposed to be doing! And no one can imagine they’re actually doing it. I don’t know. I like to think that’s what I’d do if I said that’s what I was doing… I feel like I would. But apparently we now think when someone is entrusted with a pile of money to keep as such they’d be irrational not to risk their customer funds and yolo into mismatching risk to try and pick up some yield… when did that become the expected norm?
Being opaque about what exactly you are invested in helps prevent short term liquidity risk due to a run.
SVB would have turned a profit eventually if it didn't have to disclose vulnerability.
Similarly, you don't need a bathing suit as long as you can find one before the tide goes out.
Perhaps they bought short term treasury bill so they redeemed them in full every few months avoiding the risk? T bills are still 4% or something. Or they are just lying...
You can argue that they don't need to resolve anything because... millions of people have given them their money already and don't seem to have a problem continuing to do so.
If your bank claimed to have $100B and issued kangaroo attestations from BDO Italia for some reason, would you just go hm, seems fine, or would you demand more evidence?
If you're talking about interest-bearing stablecoins, there's at least one stablecoin on that front. USDV pays out the Fed interest rate back to stablecoin holders.
Unless the Fed decides to just not pay its debts anymore, bboygravity, this is 99.999% not likely to happen.
I’m confused.