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This is funny or sad ,depending on how you look at it
US Justice Dept Mulling Criminal Charges Against Binance Founder CZ: Report https://decrypt.co/116961/us-justice-dept-mulling-criminal-charges-against-binance-founder-cz-report
Imagine you're CZ. You just exposed one of the biggest fraudsters ever. And now the DOJ wants to investage...you. Meanwhile, the actual fraudster is still free, giving interviews. Yeah, the DOJ has been looking into binance for years, but it shows the unfairness of it all I guess.
What makes you think that CZ isn't himself a fraudster?
CZ sent texts to SBF complaining about him selling 250K of Tether and how it might cause a depeg. If Tether has a $60billion market cap and people redeem all the time and it wasn't fraudulent (as it almost certainly is) then why does CZ think $250K would seriously impact it?
Beyond that: why is he even texting a competitor about his specific trades?
Beyond even that: after what happened with FTX CZ and everyone else in the crypto space has an incentive to appear transparent, yet he refused to do an actual grown-up audit.
Instead, like FTX and Tether (again: two almost certainly fraudulent things) he basically circles back round to "take our word (or this random attestation that isn't an audit) for it". I believe this is cause he can't, just like SBF (who also reassured everyone hoping to avoid a bank run). I think it's the same scenario playing out in slow motion.
tl;dr: I think they're all crooks and CZ stabbed SBF mainly due to SBF trying to amass political power and throwing shots at Binance/CZ with it. It was imperial court intrigue, not altruism. I think they're all playing the same game (except maybe Coinbase, which iirc is public and thus regulated) so I'm not surprised that CZ was able to "expose" SBF. SBF's problem was just hubris in breaking the code among thieves.
Where is the evidence for Tether being fraudulent? Everyone seems to imply that it's a fraud, but where is the proof?
Tether is ancient by crypto standards. It's the oldest and biggest stablecoin. It has defied at least five years of doommongering and considerable stresses in the 2017 crash, the COVID crash and the most recent crash. There are occasionally brief depegs, where it might go down to 0.99 cents or lower. So what? It's a live system, it's not living in the banking world of 'oh it will actually take us three business days to move your money (which purely exists in our spreadsheet)'. I highly doubt most banks could deal with an 80% share price crash, they'd need a bailout. Most banks don't have anywhere near the reserves tether does, proportionate to liabilities. That's the nature of fractional reserve banking.
Things like Luna and FTX are young and new by comparison.
If you go to their website they have some accountants describing their reserves, are you saying they're lying? Given that much of their holdings are US treasury bonds, they'll be making some decent returns there as interest rates rise.
https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports
Tether's story went from "backed 1:1 to dollars" to "holding various tokens" to "we mostly have Chinese corporate paper" all along fighting or failing audits by state regulators and redefining what it's backed by, while printing billions a month without relative inflows.
Surely you're joking? Google "Tether scam" and there's a deluge of proof, including successful investigations against Tether, which led to Tether providing new reserve definitions.
Specifically: after it settled a court case in NY with the attorney general stating that Tether wasn't backed 1:1 to USD.
They just stated that they did no wrong doing and were vindicated, updated their story to holding commercial paper and other things other than USD and continued on their day. As the saying goes: the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent, so I'm not particularly moved by the fact that Tether is old.
Lying about 1:1 USD backing is enough imo. Why would anyone trust them after that when, upon pressure, suddenly we get a different (less problematic) story once they run into trouble? Especially since they continually refuse to do an audit and, iirc, refused to be clear about which paper they held last time they were questioned on CNBC.
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