Digital asset investment products saw record weekly inflows totalling US$2.7bn, bringing total inflow year-to-date to US$10.3bn. Weekly trading turnover reached US$43bn for the week, smashing last week’s record US$30bn. BlackRock Bitcoin ETF’s weekly and monthly inflows have
PSA: If you hold $USDT you too could be this screwed
A giant discount like this would never happen if any holder of $USDT could redeem directly from Tether.
This is proof that Tether either can't or won't redeem all $USDT for $1.
Conclusion: Hold $USDT at your own risk
PSA:
#Tether
can't defend the $USDT dollar peg on their own exchange or on Bittrex, but if you would prefer to pretend that this is not happening, avoid
@tradingview
and visit
@coingecko
instead.
Possibly unbacked Tether hiding in plain sight:
5.1bn in secured loans
8.2bn reverse repo
1.5bn bitcoin
2.2bn "other" investments
$16bn of their reported $86bn against $83bn in tokens.
This is a possible $13bn hole based on their own unaudited disclosures.
1. Devasini owns 40% of Tether.
2. Tether earned $2.5 billion in 1H23.
3. Tether invests up to 15% of its profits in bitcoin.
4. Devasini's share of 1H23 profits: 0.4 × 0.85 x $2.5bn = $850mm.
5. He will sell his Bitfinex shares, but only if Tether's parent can raise...$150mm.
Isn't it interesting that Tether buys billions of bitcoin on the secondary market, but they won't buy 1 USDT?
If you owed $1 and could cancel that debt for 92c, you would think that would be a no-brainer, and yet...
Tether has reached new heights in self-contradiction.
1. They fought disclosure of their Chinese commercial paper investments ("secret sauce")
2. Defend having owned the paper as conservative and uncontroversial
3.congratulate themselves for selling it
ICYMI, Kraken has made the insane decision to START listing $TUSD after the failure of Prime Trust - i.e. at a moment when the soundness of $TUSD has never looked more doubtful.
Summing up:
1.The SEC has been saying the prices are fake so your charts are worthless.
2. $COIN says SEC compliance will put them out of business.
3.The SEC now says, don't cry if you lose all your money.
Not sure the SEC could make this any less ambiguous or more urgent. (5/5)
Isn't it interesting that since Tether began providing quarterly attestations in 2021, the growth in Tether's reported holdings of US Treasury securities has very closely tracked the growth in $USDC's market cap?
If I have added this all up correctly, it appears that in the past two hours, Tether has minted 2bn USDT and sent Binance net *ZERO* of it.
BTW, has anyone else notice that
@whale_alert
appears to be "search suggestion banned"?
🤔
75% of Americans think crypto is "unsafe."
The SEC is suing crypto exchanges for inadequate investor protections.
Crypto bros: "OMG Gary Gensler is such an electoral liability"
Remember when Binance was caught with unbacked Binance-peg BUSD on BNB chain by
@datafinnovation
and
@Patrick_TanKT
?
CZ: "BUSD is issued and redeemed by Paxos." And "BUSD is not issued by Binance."
Paxos: "Binance-peg BUSD is strictly a Binance product...."
Binance: "Our wash trading isn't wash trading"
Coinbase: "Our proprietary trading isn't proprietary trading"
Has there ever been another "industry" so transparently full of shit?
A little known alternative to publishing audited financial statements is to publicly celebrate "passing" your audit and announce your plans to "continue getting audits."
Also acceptable: "working on" an audit for 5+ years and measuring the passage of time in "months, not years."
1. $TUSD announced on June 22 that they had no exposure to Prime Trust.
2. $TUSD informed customers that due to a letter Prime Trust received on June 21, that customers could not mint or redeem TUSD.
3. $TUSD accounted for the most bitcoin volume on June 22.
"Tether can't operate on secondary markets and trade on exchanges. That's market makers job."
In other words, if you are not a "verified customer" (minimum $100k) and you own $USDT - and if the marker maker doesn't "do their job" - Tether's message to you is "tough luck."
🧵1/Ω
#Tether
's claims of $1.5 bn profit in 2023-Q1 means they must be investment geniuses.
Assume that every asset category is as they claim it was on 2023-03-31: $68.8 bn investments, $480 mm cash). If the cash equivs are 100% short dated t-bils their income would be $1.15 bn
🚨🚨🚨
"...there can be no assurance that our policies and procedures will prevent us from violating applicable laws and regulations...and such violations could adversely affect our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations."
According to this
#Tether
to USD chart on Coinmarketcap the pair did $34bn in volume in the past 24hrs.
Impressive liquidity, except for the fact that about 0.6% of that volume involved any actual USD (~$200mm).
When you want to prove someone does not work for you it must be convenient to have unfettered access to the private correspondence of the person who does not work for you.
There is a lot of noncompliance in the crypto space. It undermines confidence when so many people have been hurt and all they can do is stand in line in the bankruptcy court. Further, this can make it hard for the good faith actors to compete.
Bitfinex BTC longs spiked massively in the May 2022 crypto crash and since then have done...nothing. No selling, not even on this price spike.
Probably not market manipulation of any kind, just organic customer demand.
🚨🚨🚨
"We have been, and may in the future be, subject to inquiries or investigations concerning our compliance with these laws and regulations, which could result in regulatory enforcement or other legal action, including significant civil and criminal penalties."
Former head of financial crimes at Wells Fargo described Binance as having been "essentially a criminal enterprise."
Top two bitcoin trading pairs are on Binance in what the SEC calls "so-called stablecoins"
Binance monitor has not yet been appointed
🚩🚩🚩
In relation to complying with economic and trade sanctions programs and anti-money laundering laws and regulations," $SBNY could be exposed to "fines, sanctions, and other regulatory actions, as well as governmental investigations."
Why did Tether switch to a new accounting firm in June 2022?
Does it have something to do with the fact that starting with the June 2022 report, Tether dropped the qualifier "none to affiliated entities" from the "secured loans" line?
Hard not to notice that Binance chose the middle of the night on the eve of a US federal holiday to publish a false rumor about a US government official. As if to maximize the amount of time it would take for the rumor to be contradicted.
I have never before seen a group of financial "reporters" and "editors" having a roundtable discussion about where they would buy and sell the investment they were covering. They even asked the copy editor!
Also, why on earth does Cointelegraph have a "head of markets"?
Translation: When the DOJ takes down
#Binance
, we will take advantage of price dislocations by printing $USDT fraud bucks at Tethers treasury, send $USDT to BItfinex and pump $BTC.
How can there be a "lack of demand" if Coinmarketcap says BTC traded $20.2 billion in the past 24 hours?
1. Drill down into that number and you will find that less than 3% of that is transacted in actual USD.
🚨The UN states that
@Bitrace_team
found transactions totalling 17bn USDT connected to various criminal activities...in the 12 month period from 9/22 to 9/23 alone.
Tether’s reserves are a side show. Binance showed AML/KYC/sanctions is the real legal risk. I now see why Tether’s blog on the damning UN report was so tepid. The report is 106 pages where USDT is so often cited it’s a defined acronym in the introduction
Reminder that Binance's TOS allow it to delist a token and then convert its customers' positions in the delisted token to any token it chooses ($BNB for instance)
🚨BINANCE CHANGED TERMS OF SERVICE: EXCHANGE CAN NOW CONVERT DELISTED CRYPTO TO A DIFFERENT TYPE OF THEIR CHOOSING, WITHOUT ANY ADVANCE NOTICE.
HOPE Y’ALL ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO OWNING LOTS OF $BNB.
Sophisticated, financially-literate crypto investor is really, really angry about unsophisticated, financially-illiterate moron investors who are skeptical of crypto.
In light of
@Cryptadamist
's recent observation of near-zero $USDT burns on ethereum since February, it is worth revisiting
@patio11
's brilliant thread about the "data shadows" seen in the funding rates at Bitfinex (subsidiary of iFinex, the parent company of
#Tether
).
Two thoughts that I have broadly on discovering fraud:
1) Frauds are incapable of causing the data shadows in the world that their purported actions should cause, because complexity of those shadows is magnitudes more than complexity of lies.
2) Lies are cheap; trades less so.
Chart has 3 lines about Tether's mints and burns (which are theoretically redemptions) on ethereum since the collapse of Signature and Silicon Valley Banks:
🟩 Total mints so far
🟥 Total redemptions so far
🟪 Net mints/redemptions on that day
TL;DR there's not much redeeming.
MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 12,333 BTC for ~$347.0 million at an average price of $28,136 per
#bitcoin
. As of 6/27/23
@MicroStrategy
hodls 152,333 $BTC acquired for ~$4.52 billion at an average price of $29,668 per bitcoin. $MSTR
It certainly protects privileged users who are not on "HODL mode" - they get to sell their $cel at 65c without competition from the "HODL mode" users who are blocked from selling. Does
@mashinsky
have HODL mode activated? Is he selling $cel on this bounce?
I think this is an important point. There are a lot of theories of Tether ranging from "complete scam" to "fully backed."
But the sockpuppets and "FUD fighting" are extremely hard to explain unless there is some element of Tether that is an extremely fragile con.
"...if you buy crypto assets and the price goes to zero at some point, please don't be surprised and don't expect taxpayers to socialize your losses."
-Fed Governor Waller
Great quick take on $MSTR's 10-Q by
@RhoRider
.
You won't find much if any of this in the press release.
How far we are from the premise of buying $BTC as a use of excess cash flow from a solid underlying business.
Is the
@urbankaoboy
scenario starting to play out?
🚨 $MSTR earnings. Few initial💎s
1) Operating loss even backing out impairment charges
2) $COIN is fronting cash for bit Bitcoin buys
3) >$2.2B in long-term debt obligations creeping up. Plan to dump shares & bitcoin to cover it.
4) They're bleeding cash, dumping shares
Tether has said that they would invest "up to 15%" of their profits in bitcoin. This means Tether must have earned $1 billion this quarter. How modest of them not to disclose it.
#Tether
must have bought roughly $160-$180 million worth of bitcoin for the value of their BTC to stay almost at exactly par ($1.676 bn vs. $1.661 bn) given that the price of BTC went down 11% from June 30th to September 30th.
Kinda weird they didn't disclose this purchase...
In case there is any confusion, this not a new finding by the SEC. They have been saying it for some time. It is one of the key reasons they have kept refusing to approve a bitcoin ETF.
1/ We're hearing rumors that the SEC would like to get rid of crypto staking in the U.S. for retail customers. I hope that's not the case as I believe it would be a terrible path for the U.S. if that was allowed to happen.
In the past month, the combined supply of $USDC and $BUSD is down 4.2bn while $USDT supply is up about 2bn. Also $MSTR is probably our of cash until their next equity offering. (1/4)
In the past 24 hours, the BTC/FDUSD pair on Binance was the highest volume bitcoin pair listed on coinmarketcap with $1.5bn, more than the rest of the top 10 pairs combined.
That is especially impressive considering $FDUSD's market cap is only $409mm.
Does anybody know why Tether's attestations are all time-stamped 11:59pm UTC, when we are told their assets are in the Bahamas?
Or why Circle's attestations are all stamped 11:59pm PST (8 hours behind UTC) when their HQ and custodian are in NY?
Isn't it interesting that since Tether began providing quarterly attestations in 2021, the growth in Tether's reported holdings of US Treasury securities has very closely tracked the growth in $USDC's market cap?
@Bitfinexed
@NicheDown
The idea that Tether has somehow been "vindicated" because they still exist is ridiculous. Only an audit could vindicate them and they still haven't gotten one.
Harry Markopolos was not "wrong" about Bernie Madoff in 2000 just because the ponzi didn't implode until 2008.
Astonishing how effectively a bitcoin pump inspires complacency among the crypto plebs. Like "bread and circuses" in ancient Rome.
Anyone know how to say "exit liquidity" in Latin?