I don’t know anything about Tether or stable coins, but a quick google search says that Tethers market cap is around 111 billion. How would a collapse of Tether make BTC crash? The BTC ETF’s are buying at a rate that would offset that in a couple of days. If all of Tethers market cap somehow represents BTC holdings the market impact should be short lived. I think it would have a much harsher effect on the sh*tcoins but BTC would shine in the space. What am I not seeing?
70% of entire crypto volume is traded against Tether. Tether is a stablecoin which claims to be backed with USD or USD-equivalents for every Tether issued.
They print Tethers out of nothing(people give them crypto for collateral) and Tethers are used to pump the prices. Price going up causes the FOMO and gets attention, causing real money to flow in.
In less than 2 years(since $17K bottom) around $50B of new Tethers have been printed. Price going up coincides with new Tethers being issued.
During the same time, USDC, which is regulated under US and has actual reserves and can be redeemed(yeah, you actually can't redeem Tether LOL. That's why there hasn't been a bank run so far)...
From 2022(After FTX collapse), USDC marketcap has actually shrinked from $45B to $25B (and now in 2024 it has risen back to $33B USDC).
Tether is an offshore company which claims to have $100B+ of USD-equivalent assets. It's just that they have been caught lying about being backed(when they weren't) in the past.
And this was when they had only $2B of assets and now they (allegedly) have more than $100B.
For that reason New York has banned all trading activity with Tether in New York and issued fines.
Apparently they tried to pass on the information toward federal regulators but they were not interested.
The co-founder of Tether used to live with pedo traffickers and was even arrested along them(but later released). He was also a visitor of the infamous Epstein island where he discussed cryptocurrencies with Epstein.
If Tether was shut down, the impact would be enormous. Blockchain-wise everything would still work as normal(there would only be temporary disruption).
But it would probably have an enormous impact on the prices, because Tether is such a big player. It's the center-piece of the entire crypto trading.
I don't know that the regulators have ever taken down a ponzi scheme before it collapsed on it's own. The problem now is that Tether is being used to facilitate illicit finance and sanctions evasion and now it's become a national security risk.
This might finally force the regulators to take action. Like how many more fake USD do they have to issue before the action is taken? Would $200B be enough? Is it $500B? Do they need to issue a $trillion? I don't know.
