The price of cryptocurrencies are falling. A stable coin lost all of its value in a day. A new bank stopped withdrawing money. The investors have been ruined.
The worst may be yet to come.
Concerns are mounting over a potential vulnerability in the market: Tether, a company whose eponymous currency is a linchpin of the market. As one of the most scrutinized companies in the industry, tether is facing increased pressure from regulators, investors, economists and growing legions of skeptics who argue it could be another domino to fall in an even bigger crash.
Hilary Allen, a finance expert at American University, said that tether is the most important part of the cripto The entire facade would fall down if it collapsed.
Stable coins are pegged to a stable asset like the US dollar. Stable coins are designed to maintain a constant price of $1 and are backed by large reserves of funds. Consistency allows for safe transactions without relying on banks.
Many of the coins are stable in their names. The crash of cryptocurrencies last month was caused by the failure of TerraUSD, a stable coin with a $1 peg. TerraUSD fell when the price of Luna fell, creating a "death spiral" in the market.
By contrast, tether claims its stable coins are backed by cash and other traditional assets, making it essential to the health of the market. Anyone can exchange Tethers for U.S. dollars quickly and easily.
A lot of the company's reserves are tied up in commercial paper, according to the company's financial statements. It is more difficult to convert financial instruments into cash during financial turmoil. The company was fined $18.6 million by the New York Attorney General for lying about its reserves.
Critics say that tether is a bank that is unregulated. In return for handing over millions of dollars, traders receive millions of stable coins, which they use to bet on more volatile Cryptocurrencies such asBitcoin or Dogecoin. The 70 billion coins in circulation of tether makes it three times the size of TerraUSD.
Critics say a downturn could lead to the like of a bank run. It is possible for traders to rush to exchange their Tethers for dollars, only to discover that it is not possible. If investors lost billions of dollars, they would have to sell their other holdings, causing a potentially devastating panic.
Last month, tether got to experience that scenario. As cryptocurrencies plummeted, a flood of investors asked to exchange their Tethers for dollars, forcing the company to pay out about an eighth of its reserves. There was a time when the $1 peg of tether wavered.
The company said it met the demands. The company proclaimed that it had weathered the crisis without a hitch.
Paolo Ardoino said that the crash was the best story that could have happened to the company. We are serious about risk management and are not fooling around.
Digital currency prices crashed again on Sunday after the Celsius Network said it was suspending withdrawals. The company stated this week that it has no exposure to Celsius apart from a small investment. As the market fell, investors pulled out more than one billion dollars from Tether.
Skeptics are coming forward. A top U.S. banking official called for new rules for stable coins after the TerraUSD crash. Some traders are putting their money into alternate stable coins because they are worried about the next crash.
"They had enough to weather this run, but that doesn't mean they have enough to weather the next run."
Tether has a strange history. Brock Pierce, a child actor, was the founder of the company. He and his partner gave control of the firm to a former plastic surgeon named Giancarlo Devasini, who has stored some of the firm's assets in a bank in the Bahamas.
The amount of tether has grown quickly. More than 50 billion stable coins were issued last year. Mr. Ardoino said that they could do it if they had to.
About 50 employees work for the company in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The company wouldn't confirm van der Velde's location, but his LinkedIn profile suggests he is in Hong Kong. He and Mr. Devasini are private people. Mr. Ardoino is the public face of the company.
Mr. Ardoino said that they didn't think it would go so large. They weren't ready to be public people. There isn't anything bad about it.
The stable coins were backed by U.S. dollars. The claims were called a lie by the New York attorney general.
The exchange lost $850 million in a business deal. The stable coin was partly unbacked because the exchange took loans from the reserves.
In a settlement with the New York attorney general, tether paid $18.6 million in penalties. The issue with the company's reserves boiled down to a communication mistake.
In October of last year, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that over the course of 26 months, Tether had held enough reserves in its accounts only 25% of the time. The company paid a large fine.
The New York settlement has led to periodic statements about the composition of the reserves. Its announcements haven't done much to quell skepticism.
The amount of commercial paper in Tether's reserves decreased from February to last month. It increased its exposure to money market funds to $7 billion from $3 billion. $5 billion of its reserves were tied up in other investments. The project still lacks the kind of stability that many investors expect, according to critics.
The company's commercial paper portfolio will gradually decrease to zero without any incurrences of losses.
The most popular stable coin is tether. There has been a decrease in the number of tethers in circulation. There has been an increase in the circulation ofUSDC.
Sam Kazemian, who runs Frax, another stable coin project, doesn't think he's as confident about Tether as he is withUSDC.
Washington has been affected by concerns about tether. The Treasury Secretary called for greater regulation of stable coins when she testified before Congress.
She said that the risks associated with bank runs have been known for hundreds of years.
Mr. Ardoino said that Tether was eager to work with regulators to come up with a framework for stable coin disclosures. The proposals would subject them to regulatory requirements similar to those of traditional banks.
Mr. Collins is one of the co-owners of BLOCKv, and he said that everyone is freaked out. That is a tragedy, but it is also a tragedy when someone says that they lost their life savings at a casino. That doesn't mean casinos should be regulated out of existence.
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