3 ms·

If Tether secretly owned a bunch of their own tokens, couldn't they inflate their "market cap" for free? How would we know if this was happening?

• wmf 5y ago
  You can track tethers on the blockchain. The ones owned by Tether itself are stored in the treasury account while the rest are mostly held by exchanges. Generally there's not much (<$5B) in the treasury at any time. There's really no benefit to pumping up the market cap since it draws more scrutiny.
• skybrian 5y ago
  It's widely suspected that most of Tether isn't backed by anything. Some is getting handed out basically for free via giveaways by exchanges. The evidence seems to be mainly a suggestive lack of evidence. There is over $59 billion in Tether issued versus $49 billion a month ago. Receiving $10 billion in a month isn't easy for a shady company that most banks won't do business with. There ought to be evidence of those flows somewhere.
  • wmf 5y ago
    This may be where the commercial paper comes in. If they're backing issuance with loans that they create themselves no real money needs to be involved.