Tether, World's Biggest Stablecoin, Cuts Its Commercial Paper Holdings To Zero 53
Tether, the world's largest stablecoin, has slashed back its commercial paper holdings to zero, replacing them with U.S. Treasury bills instead, according to a blog post. CNBC reports: The popular U.S.-dollar-pegged cryptocurrency said the move is part of tether's "ongoing efforts to increase transparency" and back its tokens with "the most secure reserves in the market" -- in the ultimate hope of ensuring investor protection. There are now about 68.4 billion tether tokens in circulation, according to data from CoinMarketCap, up from 2 billion three years ago. The cryptocurrency has a market capitalization of $68.4 billion. "Tether has led the industry in transparency releasing attestations every three months, constantly reviewing the make up of its reserves," continued the statement.
Commercial paper is a form of short-term, unsecured debt issued by companies, and it is considered to be less reliable than Treasury bills. In October, Tether's Chief Technology Officer, Paolo Ardoino, tweeted that 58.1% of its assets were in T-bills, up from 43.5% in June. It is unclear where that percentage currently stands, but Ardoino did write in a post on Thursday that Tether was able to pay $7 billion, or 10% of its reserves, in 48 hours. "Ask your bank or other stablecoins if they can do that, in same time frame of course," he wrote. Thursday's statement went on to note that zeroing out the balance of its commercial paper holdings was also meant to be a step toward "greater transparency and trust, not only for tether but for the entire stablecoin industry." While not yet large enough to cause disruption in U.S. money markets, tether could eventually reach a size where its owning of U.S. Treasuries becomes "really scary," Carol Alexander, a professor of finance at Sussex University, said.
"Suppose you go down the line and, instead of $80 billion, we've got $200 billion, and most of that is in liquid U.S. government securities," she said. "Then a crash in tether would have a substantial impact on U.S. money markets and would just tip the whole world into recession."
Commercial paper is a form of short-term, unsecured debt issued by companies, and it is considered to be less reliable than Treasury bills. In October, Tether's Chief Technology Officer, Paolo Ardoino, tweeted that 58.1% of its assets were in T-bills, up from 43.5% in June. It is unclear where that percentage currently stands, but Ardoino did write in a post on Thursday that Tether was able to pay $7 billion, or 10% of its reserves, in 48 hours. "Ask your bank or other stablecoins if they can do that, in same time frame of course," he wrote. Thursday's statement went on to note that zeroing out the balance of its commercial paper holdings was also meant to be a step toward "greater transparency and trust, not only for tether but for the entire stablecoin industry." While not yet large enough to cause disruption in U.S. money markets, tether could eventually reach a size where its owning of U.S. Treasuries becomes "really scary," Carol Alexander, a professor of finance at Sussex University, said.
"Suppose you go down the line and, instead of $80 billion, we've got $200 billion, and most of that is in liquid U.S. government securities," she said. "Then a crash in tether would have a substantial impact on U.S. money markets and would just tip the whole world into recession."
"Crash in Tether"? (Score:2)
"Suppose you go down the line and, instead of $80 billion, we've got $200 billion, and most of that is in liquid U.S. government securities," she said. "Then a crash in tether would have a substantial impact on U.S. money markets
If the only thing Tether owns is US Government securities.. Then explain what you mean by a "crash" in Tether? Because by definition their asset value should be fixed without possibility of a change in value caused by the market; other than the market value of the US Government
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She means there is a run on the bank, ie, everyone who owns Tether for some reason wants to sell it.
That does leave aside the question of why they bought Tether in the first place. I don't get that at all. You'd be better off buying treasury bonds. You might even be able to do that through Robin Hood, but Etrade will definitely let you.
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People buy USDT for trading on unbanked exchanges.
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Using Tether or any other stablecoins are the core of the defi lending platforms and high frequency trading. Going from real dollars into the cryptospace and back out again, for every transaction/trade you want, isn't how you would want to do things
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She means there is a run on the bank, ie, everyone who owns Tether for some reason wants to sell it.
The "some reason" is the question..
That does leave aside the question of why they bought Tether in the first place.
That we know. Basically: holding a 1 USDT; the USDT can do anything a Bitcoin can do, AND they are non-volatile since the way they are created is pegged to the fiat currency (US Dollars). That makes holding them as a value store MUCH safer than holding a volatile.
The only real downside is they
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> The only real downside is they are centralized, AND acceptance is less, because it's Less popular than the mainstream cryptos.
That, and every other day there's another story of people losing millions of dollars when $20 million "mysteriously" disappears from yet another exchange.
Cryptocurrency welcomes criminals, so there are a lot of criminals in that world, committing a lot of crimes.
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That does leave aside the question of why they bought Tether in the first place.
Money laundering.
You'd be better off buying treasury bonds ... Etrade will definitely let you.
You need clean money for that.
Weekend at Bernieâ(TM)s (Score:2)
Where would a crash come from? (Score:3)
What would trigger such a crash? With it tied to Treasuries like that I'd think the only thing would be if Treasuries themselves crashed, which basically would only happen if the US started to default on them. The only way I see it happening realistically would be if someone engineered a crash by acquiring a huge position in Tether and then liquidating it. That though is the same scenario as someone acquiring a huge position in Treasuries and liquidating them directly, and we're at risk of that without Tether in the picture so what difference would Tether make?
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The digital equivalent of a bank run? These "deposits" are not FDIC insured. Also without proper audits and regulation, we don't know how much of the issued Tether tokens are actually backed by Treasuries? Can 75% of the outstanding Tether be redeemed in a month?
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Certainly the people holding Tether would be SOL, but even if their entire $68B market cap was backed by t-bills (making it less a run on a bank and more a one-time 100% dividend) and they had to sell in one day, it wouldn't really affect the market as a whole (the figure I found was that normal volume is >$500B/day).
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Those were scheduled. An unscheduled dump can throw things off, but it probably wouldn't destabilize the market. If it did trigger a crash, something else fundamentally destabilized it first, and the dump was just the nudge to push it over.
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?? Treasuries are not backed by FDIC because it's not a bank it's the federal government.
If that defaults and falls over you have way more problems than money.
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The digital equivalent of a bank run? These "deposits" are not FDIC insured.
Treasuries are backed by the Full faith and credit of the US government.
The US government doesn't guarantee the Tether tokens themself, but
hey are a security back by those - much like all the ETFs that hold treasuries.
What do you mean by a "bank run" in this case? The way they work.. Tether actually cannot be swarmed by individual customers to redeem Tether - and most things using it would be exchanges that have no such
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Not the same at all. If you own $100k of Tether, you don't own $100k in Treasuries. You depend on the good faith and credit of the issuing entity. And people tend to trust the Treasury Department (I know, I know) more than some obscure offshore tech company.
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Absolutely. I don't know why they dick around. If you give me $60 billion in exchange for some kind of digital tokens I mint I will be delighted to put 100% of that money into something nice and secure like major western government bonds. Thank you dear valued customer. I will enjoy my multi-hundred million a year income very much.
Re:Where would a crash come from (Score:2)
But I donâ(TM)t see how that effect the world economy. There would be no bailout. Those with the stable pin would be wiped out
Re: Where would a crash come from (Score:2)
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A rumour that Tether doesn't actually have any backing. The Tether guys publicly running off with a bunch of money. A massive sure thing golly gee to the moon cryptocurrency drop (lol).
Theoretically it could happen. It would just mean Tether would have to dump their backing bonds and people who aren't dumb would get to buy them on sale though.
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The problem with the article is there 'expert' is a British financial person not an American and ether doesn't understand how the secondary treasury market works is just hyping for the story.
Tether is buying striped coupon 3 to 9 month T-Bills ether at auction or in the secondary market. All that means is in x-months you get back the money you put into the purchase plus the 1% to 3% interest that is already baked into the non-coupon bill. You buy them in $1000.00 notes but pay $990.00 for a 3 month bill f
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The real question is what took there CFO "expert" so long to figure that out?
Everyone believed they had been using the money that allegedly backed Tether to pay themselves, cover bad debts and such accrued in their companion but totally separate, honest, exchange and loaned it out to their cronies as "commercial paper" that was very likely to default. This was largely due to the extremely shady way they "audited" themselves which amounted to little more than getting a third party to verify that the numbers added up to what they should add up to but not actually verify that they were
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What would trigger such a crash?
Easy, the insiders took the $200B T bills to the bank as collateral to take out loans, invest/gamble the money for bigger gains but lost. Now they cannot repay the bank and went bankrupt, the bank then immediately put out $200B T bills into the market to recover their money, triggering a crash in the T bills market, then it spreads outwards to other markets.
Tell me, what regulations and scrutiny is Tether and their management is under that prevents this scenario from happening?
fraudsters (Score:1)
fined by NY AG and still in litigation for its lies about holding assets, avoid Tether and all other "stablecoin", again and again they're proved not properly backed.
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Now now, while Tether, Ltd. has proven borderline-fraudulent in the past, most of the other stablecoins have transparent accounting of their backing assets. Mostly because they don't want to be the next USDT . . .
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you mean except for the ones that fell over or are falling over...
I can name a few stablecoin but none that aren't in trouble or just imploded. I say avoid them.
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On the contrary, the ones that fail failed because they had a backing asset that tanked, not because they lied about their backing assets.
See TerraUSD:
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
The backing algo couldn't handle a massive downward market swing. Everyone knew exactly how UST was backed - it was backed by LUNA. When LUNA took a dump, the algo couldn't burn UST fast enough to maintain the peg, and it crashed. It was overprinted/overminted. There were no accounting shenanigans.
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Wrong. Tether lied about their backing, they never had it.
Stablecoins are scams.
Stablecoin is pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
The purpose of Bitcoin is to allow payments between any two parties that can not be blocked by a government. It does that by being decentralized.
Tether takes the main purpose of Bitcoin, and removes it by being centralized. To the degree that some regulators think it could help to stop money laundering. Yes, it's cool that it's "stable", but the USD is just as stable and doesn't have any of the overhead.
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No
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You can make transactions without the government knowing who transacted. The problem is when you try to convert your bitcoin to cash (or something), that becomes a point where you have to identify yourself. And once one person in the transaction is identified, that person will start talking.
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Without tether you could defectively use cryptocurrency to launder money
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And to phantomfive's point, if you introduce real money into your crypto, then there's no point in having crypto. It's all the downsides of both.
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The purpose of Bitcoin is to allow payments between any two parties that can not be blocked by a government.
If that was its purpose it would not have been designed in a way that makes every transaction public, because the government can look at the ledger and use it to lean on participants in a payment to effectively block it.
Bitcoin was a maths nerd's cool hobby project. All the stuff about decentralized money that isn't controlled by governments came later, Satoshi just wanted to prove it could be done.
The other 90% is still backed by hopes and dreams (Score:1)
Good luck getting your money out (Score:1)
Tether acts like a bank without being a bank. Our ruling class is engineering a recession right now, and it's going to collapse Bitcoin the rest of the way. With it goes Tether and all these other ponzi schemes.
I'd say now is when you should get out, but that was months ago.
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Repos are mostly a zero sum game, for repo to structurally inject liquidity the volume has to keep growing linearly, which it isn't. There's a bit of skim to be made but that's a tiny fraction of the total volume, only very naive people let themselves be scared by big repo numbers.
Realistically QE can only be done by buying Securities. Securities held by the Fed have been dropping since may.
US after all this time still has the cleanest dirty shirt, US debt is garbage but everything else is worse and gold is
Perspective (Score:2)
China's holdings of US Treasuries have declined by $200 billion or more [thestreet.com] in recent memory, over the course of less than a year.
That's a big country, but it's not the whole market. Adding up the rest of the world, including domestic entities is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's good to think about everything, but a crypto that *might* some day have $200 billion worth of US Treasuries is no cause for alarm.
Amount of paper or of value? (Score:1)
Tether is not trustless (Score:2)
If for some reason the trust evaporates people will panic and want their actual dollars. A tether crash will follow.
Of course, the dollar isn't trustless either...
Clueless Clowns. (Score:2)
I find it disturbing and humorous at the same time to see these crypto companies be so against "fiat banking", while showing an absolute lack of knowledge about how banking actually works.
"Ask your bank to transfer $7B in 48 hours." is just a random statement without any knowledge or insight into how much money a random, medium sized bank transfers every single day.
Someone should try to cash out $7B of Tether, let's see how well that works.
Cool story, bro (Score:2)
Considering that these are the same people who swore repeatedly that they were 100% backed by USD (then repeatedly refused any kind of audit) and then quite begrudgingly admitted that well, maybe not all of it was backed by USD, maybe it's more like, you know, 70% of it was backed by USD... and then admitted that actually quite a lot of it was simply backed by "other assets" which apparently meant "other cryptocurrency"... and then has an accounting firm try and tally up everything (but was careful to say i
It would just be a money market fund at that point (Score:2)
Massive redemptions at money market funds are not new, if they agree to be audited and regulated as a money market fund then just give them access to the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility and problem solved.
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That would require they perform audits, which they don't--and at this point it's clear they're hiding something or they'd do an audit like everyone else.
Explain Me like I am five (Score:2)
How is it the case ? If they have a lot of US securities and they crash then they can sell the securities, maybe those drop in price due to temporary over abundance , but why would that be different from any *other* big investor suddenly finding itself forced to sell ?