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Tether's story went from "backed 1:1 to dollars" to "holding various tokens" to "we mostly have Chinese corporate paper" all along fighting or failing audits by state regulators and redefining what it's backed by, while printing billions a month without relative inflows.
Surely you're joking? Google "Tether scam" and there's a deluge of proof, including successful investigations against Tether, which led to Tether providing new reserve definitions.
Specifically: after it settled a court case in NY with the attorney general stating that Tether wasn't backed 1:1 to USD.
They just stated that they did no wrong doing and were vindicated, updated their story to holding commercial paper and other things other than USD and continued on their day. As the saying goes: the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent, so I'm not particularly moved by the fact that Tether is old.
Lying about 1:1 USD backing is enough imo. Why would anyone trust them after that when, upon pressure, suddenly we get a different (less problematic) story once they run into trouble? Especially since they continually refuse to do an audit and, iirc, refused to be clear about which paper they held last time they were questioned on CNBC.
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According to whom? A majority of their reserves are US treasuries according to BDO as of September 2022.
If you take a quick look at the market cap, about 20 billion Tether has been redeemed for USD since May 2022. You're giving the 2021 argument but we've moved on since then. Now that it's not printing billions a month but actually had billions withdrawn the last few months, does that invert your conclusion?
BDO:
They just confirmed that Tether claimed they had so and so assets on paper - not whence and why. It's literally meaningless. But sure, avoiding an audit for 5 years, and changing their claims of holdings many times is totally a string of bonafide grade-a deeds of trustworthiness!
If you collate redemption events with outside events, it's rather clear most is just drawing numbers down entirely. SBF's plots alone involved billions of Tether which were wiped off the books without fiat appearing. Tether created the tokens out of nothing and then wiped them later. Now, I don't just mean a few billions. Alameda and Cumberland received 70% of all Tether. There are concrete examples like 3 Arrows "redeeming" more than 2x the Tether it supposedly had accumulated around May. Now, in March it continued receiving more Tether - but directly on exchanges instead of its historical wallets.
There are many fun treatments like: https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-investigation-analysis/
Are you saying it wasn't a scam on the 30th of September but it was before and after? Or are you saying they just took Tether's word for it?
From the end of page 1, halfway down through page 2 it lists all the things they did. They checked over the blockchain records, they got confirmation letters from banks, looked for the collateral in the loans... Not what I'd call 'confirming that Tether claimed things'.
Yes.
Learn some accounting. They go through significantly more scrutiny when you buy a house. Tether has been shown to double or quadruple count assets in the past. Tether has been shown to literally make things up. Plenty of other friendly actors move 10x the assets into an account then remove it the day after.
That was a hit piece against Tether you know. They investigated it and found large amounts of bs and contradictory flows, not BDO.
In 2017 https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtual-currency-trading-platform-bitfinexs-illegal
It disappeared the same day.
In march, Tether claimed 4.96 billion in "other investments (including digital currencies)" when the crypto market was over 2 trillion. After it dropped under 900 million a few months later, Tether claimed 5 billion. The numbers they claim are verifiable bullshit.
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