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If Tether Ltd. had at any point in time made any significant USDT -> USD redemptions that outweighed the new USDT given out to new buyers, we should have seen t

If Tether Ltd. had at any point in time made any significant USDT -> USD redemptions that outweighed the new USDT given out to new buyers, we should have seen that by a significant number of Tethers being destroyed. Looking at the historic Tether market cap on CoinMarketCap - which is practically equal to all non-destroyed tethers due to USDT being pegged to the USD - however does not reveal any significant drop in Tether market cap ever that could be an indication of actual redemptions. And I refuse to believe that in all of Tethers' history, with all of Bitcoins' ups and downs, there has never been a period in which people weren't pulling more money out of the crypto ecosystem than other people were putting fresh money in. I would expect that to be the case in most of the Bitcoin deflation phases.

csomar 6y ago
Posting this again: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ They did redeem from 2.8bn to 1.7bn. Which is like 40% of their total value at the time. Is that significant enough?
- Slartie 6y ago
  Ah yeah, you got me. Though I don't really count that as good evidence for an actual "redemption" since it apparently was burning Tethers that came from Bitfinex: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-just-burned-500-million-usdt-stablecoin-tokens https://www.coindesk.com/tether-just-burned-500-million-usdt... And since Bitfinex is the owner of Tether Ltd., there is unfortunately no outsider that could credibly confirm to have actually received any USD in exchange for those burned Tethers. Bitfinex might just as well have sold Bitcoins from its own stash (or from customer wallets) to others for USDT and then burned those USDT in order to stabilize the USDT/USD price which wasn’t exactly holding up well at that time. If they had actually printed more USDT than they have USD in the past, this would be a smart move in order to distribute the "missing" funds more evenly across multiple crypto coins in their custody, which makes it less likely for them to run out of one of them and thus makes it less likely for the alleged scam to come to light.

csomar 6y ago

Posting this again: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ They did redeem from 2.8bn to 1.7bn. Which is like 40% of their total value at the time. Is that significant enough?

Slartie 6y ago
Ah yeah, you got me. Though I don't really count that as good evidence for an actual "redemption" since it apparently was burning Tethers that came from Bitfinex: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-just-burned-500-million-usdt-stablecoin-tokens https://www.coindesk.com/tether-just-burned-500-million-usdt... And since Bitfinex is the owner of Tether Ltd., there is unfortunately no outsider that could credibly confirm to have actually received any USD in exchange for those burned Tethers. Bitfinex might just as well have sold Bitcoins from its own stash (or from customer wallets) to others for USDT and then burned those USDT in order to stabilize the USDT/USD price which wasn’t exactly holding up well at that time. If they had actually printed more USDT than they have USD in the past, this would be a smart move in order to distribute the "missing" funds more evenly across multiple crypto coins in their custody, which makes it less likely for them to run out of one of them and thus makes it less likely for the alleged scam to come to light.