Since this article was written, the story of Tether has gotten way crazier — to the tune of over 50 Billion “USDT” tokens (unredeemable digital IOUs) created during the past few months.<p>To put this in perspective, the <i>total Tether market cap at the end of 2019 was $4B.</i> [0]. That’s more than 50 Billion dollars that have flooded the crypto ecosystem <i>since the writing of this article</i>, with no transparency about their backing or the claimed origin of the money.<p>And all of this cash is supposedly stored in a small bank in the Bahamas (Deltec) and backed by other “corporate paper,” with absolutely no accounting transparency nor audits. Insane!!!<p>I highly recommend Amy Castor’s investigative journalism on Tether [1].<p>Hardcore Bitcoiners love to complain about the Fed printing money, and I do too. But Tether is a few hundred orders of magnitude worse.<p>[0]: <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/" rel="nofollow">https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/</a> (select “Market Cap” to see the recent parabolic curve).<p>[1]: <a href="https://amycastor.com/tag/tether/" rel="nofollow">https://amycastor.com/tag/tether/</a>
And this was 2 years ago. It went exponential from there.<p>If they are for real, which I don't believe at all, they are already in the 10 top holders of US commercial papers in the world - actually the top non financial US regulated company - see details: <a href="https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1395903319659405312" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1395903319659405312</a><p>As the author of this blog said recently: "we are living in the middle chapters of a Michael Lewis book."
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?