Washington, D.C. — The Commodity Futures Trading Commission today issued an order simultaneously filing and settling charges against Tether Holdings Limited, Tether Limited, Tether Operations Limited, and Tether International Limited (d/b/a Tether) for making untrue or misleading statements and omissions of material fact in connection with the U.S. dollar tether token (USDT) stablecoin. The order requires Tether to pay a civil monetary penalty of $41 million and to cease and desist from any further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations, as charged.
So they are quite shady and running on the premise of running on a "fractional reserve".
I also urged members to read a post by @NotATether - Is Tether really that stable? Let's find out.
Sadly, this is quite true. Maybe the whole cryptocurrency industry or its main leaders like big exchanges should be demanding an explanation from Bitfinex on this matter and force them to change their ways because what they are doing is really anathema to the cryptocurrency industry itself. This has been an ongoing concern since I can remember and is always cropping up whenever Bitfinex is minting more USDT. In my view, this is even worse than what central banks are doing.