Tether Severs Ties With Its Auditor, Leaving Its Accounts Shrouded in MysteryBarely a week passes when Tether isn’t in the news. For a so-called stable coin, Tether and its acolyte Bitfinex are at the center of a lot of instability within the cryptoverse. After it emerged over the weekend that Tether had kissed goodbye to its auditor, critics of the opaque company began to wonder whether they would ever be granted a glance at the company’s books. Months of promises have ended with a whimper now that auditor Friedman LLP has exited stage left.
Tether, Friedman, and the Audit That Never WasThe Tether story is like a children’s classic that’s been retold so many times as to obfuscate many seeds of truth. What is beyond dispute is that tethers – tokens with a fixed $1 value – are widely used as a means of surrogate fiat currency by millions of crypto traders and several major exchanges. Most people have no problem with this arrangement, nor do they dispute that Tether, and Bitfinex – the exchange whose owners hold a controlling stake in the company – is profitable.
With Coinbase recording $1 billion of revenue a year, Binance raking in $300 million and Coincheck instantly compensating victims of the $400 million NEM hack in Japanese yen, exchanges aren’t short of money. It is the secretive way in which Tether operates that has given grounds for concern. Last year, after lingering rumors that the company didn’t possess the USD to cover the USDTs it was merrily issuing, Tether reluctantly agreed to conduct a public audit. Traders waited for the report to be issued, but as delays mounted up, commenters ventured that the audit would never be published. It appears they were right.
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https://news.bitcoin.com/tether-severs-ties-with-its-auditor-leaving-its-accounts-shrouded-in-mystery
