I think the article also points to the origins of the FTX fraud: was Sam Bankman Fried involved in these BTC manipulations? Or inspired by it to create his own exchange?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180620111632/https://medium.co...
Once BTC was obtained from the pumps of these currencies, it was then sold immediately for USD, which ‘flooded’ the market and depressed the price of BTC."
Tether is an operation that is a money printing machine on its own. They absolutely don't need to play pump'n'dump tricks to make money. It doesn't make any sense. Pump'n'dump schemes are risky. Tether has many options to make money with way less risk.
Its well known in the legal space and has already been addressed by multiple US courts. They're not looking for that and this isn't controversial.
Those court cases already happened in 2018-2020. Tether just needed to update its language. A financial institution not backed 1:1 to USD isn't a problem in any part of the banking sector, they just need a disclaimer that says that, and Tether updated their's and moved on. Those court cases were also about specific periods of time and were very intelligent and more nuanced than the Tether discourse in crypto spaces. Tether has periodically had more assets available, and its only controversy was about whether those were USD and US Treasuries amongst other things.
This is a probe about violating AML laws and sanctions. Which would likely only involve specific addresses in crypto and some onramps. But otherwise crypto-crypto trading won't be a part of this.
You think a dollar stablecoin won't be affected by being prohibited from touching dollars or the dollar financial system?
The result of this probe likely won't be that as the DOJ is just emboldened by their Binance and CZ conviction, where the founder spent a couple months at a Southern California Federalbsummer camp and the DOJ got a few billion dollars, and Binance continues to operate as before and no further regulatory overhang is above them and all the money coming in and out is magically seen as clean.
If Tether is sanctioned, they can't hold most dollar-denominated assets. Certainly none of the safe or liquid ones. Figuring out why it failed may take some digging. But causing it to fail is trivial.
My people in the space now believe that they have made up the hole thanks to juicy interest rates (where Tether keeps all the yield).
Personally I don't think these tether conspiracy theories were ever true. Maybe they aren't 1:1 backed, but they have always been financially well off enough to keep the company running. And after the interest rates went up, they are probably making a killing. Typical bank has minimal reserves compared to them, and everyone is fine with that.
That’s completely untrue, and Tether isn’t a bank.
In contrast, Tether has historically admitted to having as little as $100.20 in assets per $100 in liabilities [0], with a significant fraction of it in crypto and other assets that effectively wouldn't even count toward banks' capital requirements. It has probably dropped below $100 in assets per $100 in liabilities - i.e., been insolvent - at some point, and even taking its latest audit [1] at face value, it has far less capital than would be needed for a bank with the same asset profile in the US or other developed countries.
[0] https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/1np5dpcwuHrWJ4AgUg...
[1] https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/6h4YWqZOXbwtBaPtYg...
Being speculated about is not the same as “known”. In fact every tether investigation seems to end up showing they are even over capitalize and hold more than 1:1!
My understanding of the audit situation was that the big accounting firms have refused to do it, presumably due to pressure from someone to not get involved.
The one adversarial investigation I know of found the opposite [1].
> presumably due to pressure from someone to not get involved
Not how audit works.
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
It’s funny how the no-coiner crowd keeps pushing the idea that Tether is some crypto scam destined to collapse, yet every single investigation, including the NYAG’s, has failed to back up that narrative. The reality is Tether has proven time and again that their USDT is fully backed and their business is profitable. The desperation to prove otherwise is just not supported by the facts.
My guess is nobody can get them on not being 1:1 but this idea of AML violations as the attack vector makes a lot of sense.
We had precisely the same amount of information about FTX's Bitcoins as we do for Tether, for what it's worth.
Isn’t that the public Tether bitcoin address with over 75K coins?
https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/address/bc1...
That's precisely A LOT more than anyone knew about FTX's non-existent Bitcoin.
To be clear, I am not saying Tether is committing fraud. Just that to the extent there have been investigations, they came up short, and that them being short is not even among the main risks to their existence.
Regardless of whether that is true or not, seems like a terrible idea. Tether doesn't need backing on the crypto side of the ledger - they can create new tether there. If there is a depeg, it'll be from a large amount of money flowing from Bitcoin -> USD or the like. It is highly likely that will correlate to the price of bitcoin dropping (possibly substantially in the event of a Tether depeg). So I'd expect the valuation of their reserves to correlate in a bad way with the chance of them needing to sell those reserves.
Presumably they're doing this for operational reasons but I wouldn't put much weight to it in a discussion on Tether's resilience.
Plus, being a cynic I'd treat that as evidence against Tether being fully backed. Crypto that Tether owns directly could easily have been purchased without any fiat money entering the crypto ecosystem.
Tether publishes their reserves [1], only 4% are Bitcoin. 84% is "cash & cash equivalents & other short-term deposits", 3% is precious metals, 5.55% is "secured loans". They report $5B in net equity, ~4.2%. So basically, if their collection of assets declines in value by 4.2%, they become unable to redeem every coin. There are a _lot_ of ways for that to happen with 87% of their assets in T-bills and money market funds. If the shortest T-bill is 4 weeks to maturity, they have plenty of time to incur interest rate risk (e.g.: Silicon Valley Bank).
My calculations show that for a 4 week to maturity T-bill, the duration is approximately 0.077, meaning that if interest rates go up by 1%, it loses 0.07%. So even if rates go up by 5% in a week, they only lose 0.35%.
The problem with SVB is they weren’t holding very short dated bonds. Pretty much every large company has to deal with interest rate risk but as long as they keep the average duration low it doesn’t tend to be an issue.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/6h4YWqZOXbwtBaPtYg...
Edit: to save people a click, the report shows 125 Billion in assets vs 113 Billion in liabilities. Approx 81 Bil in T-bills
As far as I know, there is no evidence that they are doing anything else. (There is some evidence that they did something else in the past, when interest rates were way lower.) But this hasn't stopped tons of people from speculating that they are.
But it’s more complicated because the current trading value of a bond is not the same as the expected return you’d get if you hold it to maturity. Last year Silicon Valley Bank and others got into trouble for this reason.
Let’s say you invested $100M into a 10-year bond when interest rates were at 2%. With interest, you’ll be getting back about $122M in ten years. Nice.
But what if you’re a bank and suddenly every depositor wants to withdraw that $100M? You can’t wait ten years. You need to sell the bond. Now you face the problem that interest rates are at 4%. Somebody with $100M can invest it in a 10-year bond that will return $148M instead of your measly $122M. So nobody will pay full price for your 2% bond because they can get a better return elsewhere.
There is a lot of evidence they aren't just buying Treasuries. The only times people looked, the money was being held in weird stuff, including frozen deposits at non-FDIC insured banks and private loans [1].
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
It would not be "very simple" for them to do this. No commercial bank lets you walk up to the teller with $1B and ask to deposit it, much less $93B. The financial system doesn't work that way. They have to cycle it through bonds on the repo market, which is what most huge firms do.
Tether makes the most profit per employee of any company in the world. Their transparency, speed, and market success is renown.
This thread is full of tether truthers living in 2017.
That amount of money is a huge amount of work to manage no matter what you are trading.
The simple explanation of how they do this is that they don't have anything close to 120 billion to manage.
It is really a sociological and network experiment of how long fraud can persist when the fraud is in the short term interest of all nodes of the network.
I suspect the reason Bernie Madoff was able to persist for so long is that many of the investors thought he was front running trades because of his position with Nasdaq. People tend to be fine with fraud if they are directly benefiting from the fraud and only risking their capital in the process.
Time is not a good measure of non-fraud. That is just a rationalization because any crypto investor has to basically keep the idea of a tether fraud out of their head at this point considering the risk to the ecosystem would be so catastrophic.
What does actually grow in time is the risk to the network.
They delegate much of those issues to multiple regulated third parties.
The much referenced NYAG settlement in this discussion never shows they were committing massive fraud. There were periods when reserves included assets like receivables or funds temporarily seized by authorities but there was no finding that USDT wasn’t fully backed. The link to that settlement is thrown around with the implication that “see they are fraudulent” for those who don’t read the details.
I used to think exactly like all the anti-Tether people and conspiracies but the fact is that there exists no evidence for massive fraud and much evidence it isn’t.