Bitcoin Forum

What title says, I don't understand, so I ask.

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https://tether.to/en/transparency/

I also saw that the link stated the Total Assets amount $91,516,309,356.04, Total Liabilities $88,308,652,878.72 and Shareholder Capital Cushion* $3,207,656,477.32 and the direction is also seen as a positive and proactive measure to address concerns in terms of stability and legitimacy of stablecoins But in my opinion Tether is not a cryptocurrency that we invest or exchange to make money and if we look at its quality and liquidity lately.

Tether has been involved in a number of controversial issues in the past that originates from their parent company — Bitfinix. Secondly, Tether has been accused of being too centralized as they can restrict any address at will from transferring or moving USDT tokens on any chains whenever they want. For a project that is heavily integrated into the deep roots of defi, it leaves bitter taste in the mouth of anyone that gets on their blacklist.

the blacklist has some uses though as shown recently they have blacklisted some illegal money, after all its centralized company trying to keep their product regulated otherwise they'd face legal problems.
I think the reason why people are suspicious about USDT and don't really trust it in the past is mainly because how fast tether is growing in term of market capitalization, we all know that market capitalization of stablecoin coming from the asset reserved by the stablecoin itself, so many people are suspicious as if they are just printing their stablecoin out of nowhere without real asset backing it up therefore the illusory pegged value.
but right now they seemed to be rather transparent about it, therefore many people are just trusting it, moreover because they are among the longest standing stablecoin and the most widely accepted stablecoin people just use it regardless of any rumours.

Don't just take their word for it. The daily data itself is not reviewed by an independent organizations. What you should probably rely on is their Consolidated Reserves Report or what's called the "CRR" which is published quarterly. It's limited and it does not give the a full picture of the companies financial health but at least it's audited independently.

I guess that if they have controversial issues in the past and they're accused of being too centralized, then perhaps this daily report can be aimed at redeeming their image in the eyes of the public. Despite their true intentions for these publications, so far it'll add value and show their transparency to the public, then it's a welcomed development for me. I like the crypto space because of the numerous options that it has, whether it's cryptocurrencies or exchanges, we have plenty to choose from, so if one is not giving us desired value, all we have to do is switch to another one that can give the change we want.

Well, that's how all stablecoins work actually. But somehow Tether receives all the hate.

They don't let independent firms audit their reserves. What good is their word if they are lying? The amount they claim to have in their reserves doesn't even make sense, that's 88 billion dollars. They can add or substract a billion in a second which they do it all the time. Doesn't it look suspicious to you?

What you say is like asking a thief if he stole anything in the past.

Lots of shady stuff is going on with tether and hopefully I am wrong about it.

It has been proven many times that Tether prints a lot of USDT, much more than what they have in dollars in their bank accounts or even the assets and securities in their possession, and this percentage may not reach 5%, so they do not strive to prove that they have sufficient securities to cover 1 :1 As much as they prove that they are able to withstand if a large amount of withdrawal is requested, I believe that although the United States government knows that they do not have enough assets, their cooperation and ban on any transaction makes them leave this currency without imposing fines.

First of all why should we believe this numbers ? It's their own audit and this is not done by a third party and until it's audited via a reliable third party auditing firm we will.not believe in the numbers shared, they can easily manipulate is with these made up numbers which they publish to fool us and to continue gaining our trust that our funds are safe but in reality they will not even have 1/4th of the reserve which they have mentioned and it's a bubble which is gonna burst anytime.

Secondly, Why USDT is getting all the hate? It's simple, because it has the most funds out of all the stable coins and when one talks about stable coin Tether is the first thing which comes to their mind and it's obvious that the more people use it more it would get more exposure and it would go through more scrutiny, which they can shut down by allowing an third party audit.

When you see their Wikipedia page, you may know why they're controversial stable coins. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency))

I admit they are the most popular stable coin right now, even though there are a lot of controversial, but they are totally centralized. They also lack transparency, despite their claims of transparency. The most dangerous thing and concern is that they might freeze any address with the funds if they want. So that's why they are marked as controversial and suspicious stable coins.

Probably because it is not stable anymore as it depeg recently this year and that’s why many lose their confidence about this stablecoin. Yes, they are issuing report daily just for the purpose of marketing it but of course those are the data that can still be manipulate, you can’t trust any stablecoin easil because of what happened in the past. There’s still a risk so don’t overconfident and stay alert with the stablecoins.

Having that report daily doesn’t guarantee anything especially if you are a centralized coin that can manipulate the data itself. We can’t deny that many are starting to hate stablecoins in general for some purpose, probably they are seeing something here that might not be good for their investment strategy. Tether started to lose their reputation because of their past issues and having this report daily can’t help that much to regain the trust of the public again.

USDT might be the biggest stable coin network but its heavily centralized nature is an issue for many users. It can freeze an asset and their other controversy is very popular in the market. I am not sure if the report they published  is legit or not because these statistics need to be audited by a reputable third party so that we can verify their authenticity. I recently saw news that they are going to launch five new projects this year. I am not sure what type of project those will be but USDT itself is not ready for DeFi to be centralized.

This is something that's same to all centralized stable coins, including usdc but usdc is considered safer compared to usdt.

From the Wikipedia you linked and other responses here I conclude that Tether is not transparent, and their transparency report means nothing unless done by a reputable third party.

Tether is only releases transparency reports once per quarter. They've only been doing these for the past 3 years after there were accusations of not being fully backed and they were investigated by New York's Attorney General. Prior to that there were promises of audits which they never really did and instead released incomplete information. If you check the reports & reserves section on their transparency page you can see that they've switched auditor multiple times which raises some questions about whether they're just shopping around for auditors which will let them get away with providing bare minimum and incomplete evidence.

if that is true then we should be getting even more motivated to diversify porfolio of stablecoins not just putting it in USDT.
the thing with stablecoin in general, we don't know when it gonna goes bankrupt. it just happened in a flash then suddenly our money which was supposdly kept in stablecoin to make it reserve its value instead losing its value in the blink of an eyes which is definitely so unfortunate, because the mistake was not ours.
speaking about TUSD incident which many believed couldn't happen but still happening, when the reserve didn't suit the amount of USDT it represented in the chain, then it just means that the coin value is fake and when many people realize that, they'd know instantly that such coin is shitcoin.

People used it as stable coin meant a coin that has stable value. Since when people used it the stable token as investment instrument? That doesn't even make sense. People used it to trade against volatile assets.

A volatile asset to be traded against volatile asset is quite risky and that's why people had chosen tether as a way to provide less volatile trade. Tether is a crypto that used to avoid the volatilty and keep the value of your investment stable coz it's peg to the fiat money.

You own tether = you own fiat money. There's nothing different. I kinda feel so strange if there are still people called tether as an instrument of investment.
It's just tokenized fiat money to avoid the vilatilty in the crypto.

Tether publishe a report every day to show how much transparent they are. In my point of view This is a good thing in the cryptocurrency world because it is telling users about the money that supports the stablecoin. By the way some people have doubt about Tether in the past.  And the transparency reports give some comfort.
But still the Tether have some issues. Tether were facing some issues in the past too.
Like we can see that the latest freeze in Tether.
https://decrypt.co/206694/tether-freezes-225m-usdt-feds-say-is-linked-to-human-trafficking

Means there is something cooking in the Tether. So don't know Exactly what can happen. We should be careful about that.

Interesting thing I learned, Tether Limited is owned by the Hong Kong-based company iFinex Inc., which also owns the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange.  ;D
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)

Everyone has questions about what they have kept vague about Tether for so long. I think the asset guarantee with Tether has always been a secret. Because after many years of operating in the crypto market, we all understand the important role of Tether, but it is clear that if the market share becomes larger, we will have more transparency.

I have a little speculation that, after the recent short-term controversy, the core things are receiving more attention before the ETF spot approval event. And whether the name Tether can be a factor causing volatility, we need more time to verify.

This is similar to the proof of reserves that is actively published by top exchanges from time to time since the FTX collapse — same problem, no way to verify the numbers. The Tether team addressed this last year when USDT depegged for a while (around the same time as Luna and UST crashed)  — they said those reports are going to be the best we can expect or get from them.

As for the reason why they're the most hated, it's simply because Tether and it's parent company Bitfinix has been heavily involved with a lot of controversies in the past.

I think Tether team needs to stop this self reporting and allow a third party auditor to do their independent job and audit their account. I have been defending Tether for so long but with all that had happened in the past, we can trust anyone in the space again without any form of verification. To my surprise, they still claim on their website that All Tether tokens are pegged at 1-to-1 with a matching fiat currency and are backed 100% by tether’s reserves. The value of our reserves is published daily and updated at least once per day.. If this is true, what are they scared of.

So I presume you think censorship during Communism was useful and fun too?

The Blacklist is the worst feature of USDT.  I do not understand how some people are giving it praise.

Not only Tether, but centralized coins and services in general. 99% of them are dishonest and aren't transparent, since you cannot verify anything they do or say, the only option left is to "trust" their words and that is something that i'd not do. Whatever transparency report or proof of reserves that they publish is all bullshit, i would not still believe it if it were audited by a third party, because at that point i'd have to trust the third party, and how can i be sure that they cannot be compromised. Do not forget: don't trust, but verify.

I am not sure where this rumor is coming from. They have been using independed (https://tether.to/en/tether-releases-independent-auditor-report-from-top-5-accounting-firm-bdo-reinforcing-its-dedication-to-transparency-and-revealing-another-major-cut-to-commercial-paper-holdings/) auditing services.

Imho this hate towards tehter has long history and roots for it coming from the past when tether was one of the most centralized and regulated service and people thought it was a thread to crypto, as it was sort of mascarating crypto for newcomers.

I don't see it that way as it was important liquidity source. In the past we used to have mainly btc pairs with alts. Which wasn't a bad thing but in bear run it was quite devastating when your options were to cash out or hodl.

Prolly it is because that they have not been transparent even before. Due to the lack of clarity with the backing up of their total supply and real USD back up, this is why it seems suspicious.
However, AFAIK, they've already redeemed themselves and managed to proved the actual backing up and real in numbers. This is a good reporting if they're going to do it on a daily basis but such questions will be raised again about accuracy and integrity of the data and numbers they will provide with these reports.

For a very long time people have suspected that tether does not have in reserve all the dollars that they claim to have, and at least there seems to be some evidence that at least at some point in time those suspicions were correct.

So they are trying to fix that image by doing this, however now the biggest danger is that people holding their coins can lose everything if they just decide to freeze your coins, a risk that exists with all centralized stable coins, so when taking everything into consideration I doubt the criticism against tether is going to stop.

I think this step https://tether.to/en/transparency/ is a positive step, but here I think industry standards or regulations that are as accountable as possible are needed so that they can help provide clear guidelines to users so that they are informed by everyone and are seen as able to alleviate concerns and increase trust. .

They actually post some reports from Independent Auditor https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports but I guess the skeptics in this forum who already understand how important is decentralization will never trust any centralized project like Tether, and I think they are right, not to trust centralized project, but until there is a decentralized stable coin, USDT will still be the top option.

There are options like DAI which are comparatively more decentralized than usdt.

Of course they are right, centralized coins like USDT are not supposed to be trusted, people should not use coins that they have trust a central authority when they use it, like Tether. When you use USDT you have to trust Tether than your coins are pegged and backed 1-to-1, and trust isn't something i am ready to give to a centralized service, because you might just be hodling coins that were printed out of thin air and backed by nothing.

I can understand that there are traders who "must" use USDT, but if you aren't trading; do not hodl USDT for the long term, only use it when you have to and then convert to a coin that is open source and you can verify anything yourself.

This is true, and right now tether dont have the cash https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports according to this only tether only have 0.4% Cash & Bank Deposits this is the liquid one right or I am wrong but still this is the biggest stablecoin despite any controversial issues.

they made audit in a quarter or per month. the reserve had 1.92% Bitcoins so my logic just simply said "is tether buy bitcoin out of thin air and then make it as a reserve?"