Almost all fiat deposits into Bitfinex create USDT.
Thats an additional fact that the amount is in line with the amounts that would be deposited into any big exchange.
If Coinbase minted USDC whenever someone deposited, you would see the same kind of growth.
The basis of your entire post is assuming impropriety based on pretty normal behavior with the addition of the business quirk of when USDT is created.
The ability for impropriety is a good enough reason to avoid it, and their unilateral willingness to do so without any discussion can reinforce that. But people thought everything you thought since the beginning of Tether in like 2014 or so, but the reality is that it “only went fractional reserve” in 2018. Its kind of like they threw up their hands and said “well people think its a ponzi anyway might as well cover this business debt!” The irony being that the NY AG investigation actually proved that prior to 2018 it functioned exactly as promised, barring their 2017 distress by having nowhere to put their fiat deposits.
But if you assume that it hasnt come crashing down because Bitfinex does what they said, then it still does make sense: crypto prices pump after Tether mints because it is people depositing into the exchange and then buying crypto.
Any way glad USDC and DAI are growing a lot now, which have grown by the same orders of magnitude.
Is 'pretty normal business behavior' pretending two entities (bitfinex and Tether) are arms lengths entities with no relationship to each other to hide the conflict of interest, along with the provably lying about the actual backing of the coin, and using what were supposed to be customer trust funds to bail out what was supposed to be an explicitly stated unrelated business?
If so - be aware those are felonies in many industries and are probably criminal in most jurisdictions (fraud at a minimum). For very good reasons.
What you are pointing to is expressly pointing out that 1) it is illegal, 2) it is illegal for a very good reason, 3) if anyone finds out the illegal things going on, it will likely result in catastrophic (or at least very, very expensive) consequences.
The pretending part that Tether and Bitfinex were doing was fundamentally different than the walling happening within financial institutions, where it has to be disjoint staff, disjoint control/leadership, and if someone sneaks through compliance and shares data (wink wink) it is highly likely someone will get fired if compliance finds out.
In the Tether/Bitfinex issue, they shared board members and ownership despite claiming they didn't in public, and were misrepresenting themselves in a very material way as independent.
If you were just adding some information, apologies. If you were advocating that clear evidence someone is brazenly committing a crime is not a justifiable and strong reason to distrust them, or even that it is inappropriate to hypothesize how they could be getting rich while continue to do similar things - then yikes?
If you were saying Situation Normal, All Fucked Up - then extra yikes?
Goldman Sachs (or some random VC firm) say might have some subtle versions of this going on, but if they were doing what Tether is and has been doing right now, they wouldn't be a solvent entity for very long. That Tether is hiding from jurisdictions (for now) in a way that Goldman can't doesn't inspire confidence in their trustworthiness or stability going forward, as they're clearly on the radar now and blood is in the water. Along with a lot of money and some high profile political promotions, potentially.
USDT, USDC and DAI each have their own set of counterparty risks.
USDT is regulated somewhere sunny, USDC somewhere that could be hostile if given enough power, and DAI is backed by digital assets such as custodied Ethereum.
The sooner there are more solid options in more jurisdictions, and more certainty around USD stablecoin regulation, the better.
I will be very glad to see Tethers go away.
I can’t find where Tether is ACTUALLY regulated, but I can find a lot of misinformation about where it is regulated and how, even in their own legal pages. For instance, they claim they are regulated by FinCEN. However, they appear to only be registered with FinCEN for the purpose of reporting crimes and the like (money laundering), which does not (quite explicitly) give them the right to claim FinCEN in any way is regulated or overseeing them in the traditional sense.
If someone runs across Tether (somehow?) explicitly committing money laundering in a jurisdiction that FinCEN controls, yeah they could go after them - but since they don’t have an address near as I can tell, that’s not easy to do, and all they say on the matter is they are ‘incorporated in Hong Kong’ [https://tether.to/contact-us/]
Given the amount of money we’re taking about, the number of investors affected and the extent of the fraud around these entities, I’m surprised we have not yet seen a securities class action suit raised against them... I suppose it’s all good while the ROI goes up. After the seemingly inevitable crash, I suspect a SCA would be on the cards
Goldman absolutely does play games like this on the market making side, but the difference is that the chairmanships of Goldman and the Federal Reserve tend to be a revolving door. They’re a special kind of royalty.
Your linked article keeps calling "The Chinese Wall" an "offensive and racist term." I don't understand that. I always assumed that the term refered to the Great Wall of China, i.e. a large, famous and fortified wall designed to keep groups on opposite sides separated, hence its metaphorical use in business. Is there some other connotation with regards to that term that I'm unaware of?
I am able to perceive things that don’t all reach negative conclusions. That doesn’t mean I like the product or the organization or have any specific opinion on it. That’s how due diligence works.
I agree and have always found this interesting. But it is similar behavior in more transparent stablecoins. Only Gemini’s GUSD has seemed to completely burned to nothing at one point. But USDC and DAI have growth so similar to Tether during bear markets that I cant put the lack of burns squarely on Bitfinex.
Either there is a broader accounting issue with minting and burning methodologies or people/entities really do hold.
During bear markets large market participants are still buying, and a tiny portion of people are providing the price discovery, and this is mirrored in the increasing amounts of crypto that have not moved from addresses in a long time.
Many people hold the stablecoin itself, instead of going back to fiat. So there is growth of all market participants, even during bear markets when other cryptos are falling out of favor.
Thinking out loud, I've paid a lot of graphic designers and marketers in India this year in Tether. They arent familiar with crypto but just notice that their Unocoin app takes it. We’re not doing paypal, and all fiat transfers are domestic with none of fees, time, or scrutiny that an international fiat transfer would have.
The nature of all stablecoins is that if the supply does not match the demand then there are arbitrage opportunities to mint more, which can be initiated by the user. If Tether is worth $1.02 then you can mint a new tether by depositing on Bitfinex and selling that Tether for a 2% premium.
So if all the stablecoins have similar growth patterns, the things going for Tether are simply first mover advantage and greater clout in Asia.
Yes it’s a scam and 30 billion dollars deposited in a year is a laughable claim, particularly from a company with a history of lies and fraud. Nobody in the crypto space calls them on it because the fact they get away with it calls into question the entire ecosystem.
> Almost all fiat deposits into Bitfinex create USDT.
As a matter of fact that is NOT true. (speaking as a crypto hedge fund manager, active since 2013, and trading > $1B/month on all major exchanges). It used to be like that in the past (when USD and USDT where one just represented as "USD" on Bitfinex), but this changed a year or two ago. Now, USD wires are being credited as USD and USDT deposits are being credited as USDT. And there is a USDT/USD market on Bitfinex to exchange between the two.
Why does USDC and USDT need to exist for this? What’s the benefit of not just having USD in your Coinbase/bitfinex acc if they’re meant to be pegged anyway?
Tax arbitrage, iirc. In some jurisdictions like the US, exiting your position into USD is a taxable event for capital gains taxes. I seem to recall stable coins were invented to avoid that. I can't imagine tax authorities allow that loophole though.
> Tax arbitrage, iirc. In some jurisdictions like the US, exiting your position into USD is a taxable event for capital gains taxes. I seem to recall stable coins were invented to avoid that. I can't imagine tax authorities allow that loophole though.
If they did, it looks like it's closed now. At least in the US, converting between two cryptocurrencies is a taxable event:
> There are plenty of questions about whether or not investors can claim a direct crypto conversion (e.g. bitcoin to ethereum) as "like-kind", avoiding taxes on those transactions. The tax laws changed beginning in 2018, and like-kind exchanges are only applicable to real estate transactions.
You send USDC/USDT to another exchange, use it to pay for stuff, store it in a hardware wallet, etc. USD can only be transferred back to your bank account.
Because many exchanges are in no way capable of holding a banking relationship with a legitimate bank that transacts in USD.
edit: Perhaps that was overly snarky - the issue is that the US requires legitmate banks to take certain efforts to identify their customers (KYC), and prevent money laundering (AML). Meatspace banks aren't perfect in this regard either, but many crypto exchanges are either unable or unwilling to do this, or are already proven to be engaged in fraud or other financial crimes.
No way interested and running an equivalent business with much less overhead and faster growing customer interest with higher returns, has nothing to do with crime or incompetence or imperfection
I don't fully agree with that.
- Cheaper: Well most decent banks I have been working with don't charge on USD wires, or they charge something like $20 flat, which happens to be on par or cheaper than the ethereum blockchain fees nowadays
- Faster: In my experience (in sending hundreds of wires every month), the actual "sending time" of USD wires via Fed wire or SWIFT is literally minutes, so that's on par with blockchains. Most of the time the funds are just stuck somewhere in the compliance department. The same would hold if you withdraw/deposit USDT/USDC to an exchange. Funds can still get stuck waiting for compliance approval.
- Easier: That's debatable. I guess some banking UIs are better than others. And blockchain is not particularly known to be UI/UX friendly either.
One definite advantage I could think of is that when you hold USDT/USDC in your wallet, then you have full control over them, but I bet 99% of the USDT/USDC is held on exchange, and exchanges are more and more starting to act like banks (with all the slowness that that entails).
Its like cellular service in an underground subway station: people tell you it arrived and use it and nobody thinks about it afterwards. There wont be a source about that whether you believed it or not.
If everything is fine and dandy with them why are they stopping trading in NY? Why is the AG claiming they lied about reserves, the one thing they really-really shouldn't have been? (Insert "you had one job" meme.)
I didn’t write that everything is fine and dandy with them.
The world toolset doesn't function under a “your either with us or against us” mentality, it functions as a gradient.
That gradient is that the NY AG case showed Tether was functioning properly until 2017/2018. If you were around crypto at that point in time, you would know that people would not have believed they had full reserves ever.
Just reread what I wrote. You are deciding to see advocacy for Tether which is not what I wrote at all.
They haven't "functioned properly" because they promised audits, transparency/openness and independence, and none of that happened even back then. They then found out that they can keep up the empty promises and started dipping into the sauce, and now finally one investigation caught up with them.
Your selective omissions imply advocacy - at least this is how it seems to me, and I'm not saying that's bad/good.
You make multiple false, assertions in one comment, backtrack those assertions in other comments, and then pretend your position has remained unchanged the whole time.
It comes across as dishonest and makes me, an outsider, wonder how much tether you own.
I am not sure how you interpret the AG report to think it shows they were functioning properly. They haven't shown proof of backing at any point. They have shown they had the money in the account at one point which is nowhere close to showing you have backing. Statement of balance is completely meaningless, especially when it comes from ac transfer done from your sister company like a day before.
All the AG report shows is just more evidence it's one huge scam.
How come you just come here telling that deposits in bitfinex creates USDT
But Paolo himself post that all the usdt minted is 'tron replenish' everytime whale alert tweets about 800,000,000 USDT frwshly minted
So, basically, in your intentions to defend USDT you are even contradicting what its own CEO says...
It's also funny how tesla 1.5b investment and microstrategy few millions buy are to be 'celebrated' as big and huge, yet you are trying to convince us there is people depositing 800m daily into bitfinex?
US equities are choosing to make a big deal out of something benign at fairly small amounts. The corporate debt market is massive with almost all blue chips routinely issuing short term debt that dwarfs anything Microstrategy did, for completely ambiguous purposes and the market does not care as long as its paid back. 100 billion $ worth of US commercial paper was issued just in the last month with no fanfare whatsoever and no disclosure on what the proceeds are for. Microstrategy’s dabbling in the corporate debt markets is only news because the CEO wants it to be.
The volumes from a large crowd that can also include institutional can very easily be large.
A recent example is the Saudi Aramco IPO, particiption in that IPO used Saudi retail investors and Saudi payment rails and resulted in $25bn in purchases. That one country’s internal financial system was able to handle it and there was just that much participation.
Tether doesn't have the transparency we will want. Choose a different product for that reason alone, and there are options now.
But assuming the worst, out of the universe of assumptions, is just as useless as assuming the best. The western world says “all this is improbable so lets assume it is impossible”, the eastern world doesn't seem to care and there are examples where much larger sums of money could show that Tether’s growth is not improbable or impossible.
The point is that $30bn of deposits (whether some of that is counted incorrectly on multiple blockchains) is not noteworthy enough on its own to reinforce your conclusion. Many random brokers have that. If they had a stablecoin that was minted upon deposit, you would see the same thing. And here, institutions also use Bitfinex and $30bn is actually then a reflection of how small the crypto markets are.
I agree with you that GP's post hardly makes any sense but
> ... yet you are trying to convince us there is people depositing 800m daily into bitfinex?
800m daily would have meant 300 bn USDTs created in a year. They create 30 bn in a year, no 300 bn. It's huge but you are one order of magnitude off no?
Their post doesn't describe normal behavior. It describes what would be illegal behavior elsewhere. It may be somewhat legal depending on the underlying reasons due to the quirks of not being regulated but renegading on promises to investors is not normal behavior when it comes to things like audits.
> Almost all fiat deposits into Bitfinex create USDT.
Which is insane. Those are customer funds, that Bitfinex owes to their customers, if they choose to withdraw from their ecosystem.
They aren't a personal piggybank for them to dip into as they please.
This is not at all like fractional reserve banking, where a financial liability (customer deposts) are used to print dollars (in the form of loans), because customer deposits can be called back anytime, while loans cannot.
With Tether, if Bitfinex takes a dollar a customer deposits, and then prints and sells a USDT, and the customer withdraws their deposit, they have to destroy a USDT, in order to maintain the 1:1 peg. There is zero evidence that they are doing this at anywhere near the rate they claim.
Ironically, what they are doing is very similar to a double-spend.
This case stops short of proving exactly what percent they are currently backed at - there is almost certain some level of "legit" deposits (Tether has value in evading capital controls). The weight of evidence is strongly in favor of past financial crime, and the imposed transparency requirements suggest NYAG suspects these issues are ongoing. I dont suspect they will ever provide satisfactory evidence of legitimacy, and the DOJ is almost certainly investigating them by now.
Thats an additional fact that the amount is in line with the amounts that would be deposited into any big exchange.
If Coinbase minted USDC whenever someone deposited, you would see the same kind of growth.
The basis of your entire post is assuming impropriety based on pretty normal behavior with the addition of the business quirk of when USDT is created.
The ability for impropriety is a good enough reason to avoid it, and their unilateral willingness to do so without any discussion can reinforce that. But people thought everything you thought since the beginning of Tether in like 2014 or so, but the reality is that it “only went fractional reserve” in 2018. Its kind of like they threw up their hands and said “well people think its a ponzi anyway might as well cover this business debt!” The irony being that the NY AG investigation actually proved that prior to 2018 it functioned exactly as promised, barring their 2017 distress by having nowhere to put their fiat deposits.
But if you assume that it hasnt come crashing down because Bitfinex does what they said, then it still does make sense: crypto prices pump after Tether mints because it is people depositing into the exchange and then buying crypto.
Any way glad USDC and DAI are growing a lot now, which have grown by the same orders of magnitude.