Elon Musk and his negativity about bitcoin’s non-eco-friendly mining process gained plenty of media coverage this week. But something else happened a few days ago that certainly affected the whole market.
The stablecoin Tether published a report that shows their entire reserves breakdown until 31 March 2021.
This is how it looks:
We know that Tether has claimed that all of their USDT tokens are backed by actual cash deposits. Throughout the years, they have changed this claim to say different things, though. Looking at the pie charts they made public, we can see that their whole reserves aren’t backed up by
cash and cash equivalents.
“
Cash & Cash Equivalents & Other Short-Term Deposits & Commercial Paper” take up
75.85% of their reserves. But how much of that is actually backed up by cash? According to the chart,
only 3.87%.
The biggest reserves of over 65% are
commercial papers. This category should represent some type of securities. According to the source, a similar type of commercial papers was part of the problem that led to the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, which signalled the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008.
Wall Street investor Caitlin Long, who has defended Tether many times in the past, was critical of Tether’s choice of assets to keep as reserves. If Tether wanted to keep the risk for users as low as possible, she believes that government bonds would have been a much better choice. The commercial papers introduce a credit risk that could result in USDT no longer being pegged to the USD. Instead, Tether went for “
commercial papers” to profit on the interest rates. According to the same source,
a 1% interest would net the company a profit of $582 million annually.
If that is true, Tether makes money with the funds users invest when they buy USDT but leaves all the risks on the users by keeping inadequate reserves.
What is your opinion on this?
Is Tether cancer we have to get rid of for bitcoin and the crypto market to have a prosperous future?
How big of an impact do you think this Tether disclosure had on the recent downtrend of bitcoin and the whole market?
Source:
https://bitcoinblog.de/2021/05/17/nicht-so-prickelnd-aber-auch-nicht-so-katastrophal-tether-veroffentlicht-zusammensetzung-seiner-reserven/