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Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

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Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#83
post #5

glad to see hn isn’t buying it but retail investors may not be so lucky.

HN’s track record on stuff like this is really bad.

This is a place to get interesting news on startup valuations, Rust, and what the current FE framework of choice is.

For everything else it might as well be Reddit.

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note there no mention of redemptions, just a reduction in the circulating supply. My guess is the USDT was borrowed and Tether is holding less commercial paper now.

>Note there no mention of redemptions They have mentioned paying out billions in redemptions on twitter.

From the horse's mouth:

"Tether has over $70 billion dollars of collateral which it can redeem USD₮ against. No exchange’s order book has anything remotely resembling that amount of liquidity."[0]

When you look up the attestation that they provide each quarter 24% of this collateral is commercial paper.[1]

Companies could be redeeming USDT for their own commercial paper.

If you trust these attestations they have a lot of treasury bills and have increased their cash holdings by a couple percent so fingers crossed for those holding USDT.

[0] - https://tether.to/en/understanding-tethers-peg-and-reserves/

[1] - https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#85
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In tether’s case this is the same - withdrawals through it’s operator for fiat cash take tether off the market and lower it’s market cap. A more accurate description would be „withdrawals minus deposits”, but it’s quite obvious that this is what is meant.

It depends. Tether lies constantly, and has lied many times. We have NYAG and CFTC settlements to that effect. The point parent is making, AFAIK, is that without actual audits (that they have promised for years were only months away) we have no idea if they actually processed $10B of withdrawals. Or whether they simply nuked $10B of unbacked Tethers from orbit. Maybe they printed $10B, used it to buy Bitcoin, then so…

Important to note that they can only nuke that is under their control right now, and presumably Bitfinex' (and perhaps some other entities). Everything that is in wider circulation can only be removed through actual withdrawals.

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They likely have backing of more than 50% probably more than 80%. Although how much is liquid is unknown.

They only had $4.2B in cash during their last attestation. The rest was unknown treasuries and commercial paper.

Who cares about their attestation? It is not a proper audit. They could just borrow money from Bitfinex, take a screenshot of them holding the money, saying "see, we have money" and then return to Bitfinex on the same day.

Their attestation is as worthless as their word.

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#87
post #7

The most concerning thing to me about Tether is they appear to own Chinese corporate debt for some unknown reason. Isn't that an insane amount of risk? In what universe is Chinese corporate debt even remotely liquid? It could be invested in Evergrande-adjacent companies for all we know. And you know when push comes to shove the Chinese government will throw foreign investors under the bus first.

I have absolutely no way to substantiate this, but I feel like if you needed to be able to say that you technically had a few billion in reserves as cheaply as possible but didn't actually think you'd ever need to liquidate it, buying the riskiest debt you could might be a great way to do that.

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#88

This is either a good thing in that "wow, they atleast have $10B to redeem instantly" Or its a bad thing in that "welp, there's all the insiders exiting the boat first"

It could be those, but nobody outside knows whether any Tether was actually redeemed though. They are alleged to have insider connections with a bunch of different parties so they could just have burned Tether that had been created from nothing and lent out to an insider.

Tether is pretty much another arm of Bitfinex, and Bitfinex is where all the whales trade. Its a huge insider game.

I wouldn’t hold Tether long term even if I was being paid for it

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#89
post #81

Quoted post unavailable.

Is there an easy way to do this? Are you telling me that I could have shorted UST?

Anchor protocol[0], which was most likely a large contributor to the collapse, was a lending application. Would have been easy to get a large chunk of UST from that. Not sure how your collateral would fare in the current situation, though.

[0] https://www.anchorprotocol.com/

Re: Tether Withdrawals Top $10B

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is honestly the most asinine remark. Tethers are supposed to be backed by $1 in assets. You're complaining that dollars are created out of nothing - they're not, of course, but even if they were: When Tether holds less than $1 of backing assets for each $1 of USDT in circulation it's worth strictly less than the $1 you're deriding. It is this gap we're talking about. So your comment isn't just wrong, it's comple…

> Banks are backed by the FDIC which in turn is backed by the Fed, you cannot have a bank run anymore. It's not possible. Yes, it is possible. FDIC doesn't insure all deposits. Typically you're capped at X thousands across all your accounts . I'm not sure what the current value of X is, 250? That said, a bank run is improbable. Also, be careful with cash holdings at investment institutions. Those are typically not FD…

Yeah, the UK had a bank run (Northern Rock) during the financial crisis in 2007. Once confidence was lost, some of the run was people with more money than our insurance limit in there, the rest ordinary small depositors who didn't feel like trusting an untested insurance mechanism when they could have banknotes.

That run was stopped by the government guaranteeing all assets and nationalising the Rock. That's not likely to happen with crypto.

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