I've been doing some small-scale arbitrage trading in Uniswap and other Defi exchanges. As part of that I hold a fair bit of Tether, USDC and other stable coins.
The reason being is that I want to keep my capital pegged to the dollar, but need something that's native to the Ethereum blockchain. If there's a trading opportunity, I need the ability to swap Tether for [X] token in a single blockchain transaction. There's no time to route actual dollar deposits from a real bank.
Considering that there's something like $13 billion locked in all the various defi protocols, that's a lot of potential demand for stable coins.
It's likely that most/all of that stablecoin was amassed by selling other crypto, which is zero sum. It's extremely unlikely that people took fiat currencies, and bought USDT directly from Tether, which is what they claim is happening.
Totally irrelevant, the man's got a vested interest. Believe nothing short of an independent third-party audit from an auditor who doesn't walk out half way through like the last one did.
The reason I say this should be pretty obvious to anyone whose familiar with the inner working of a Ponzi scheme or other similar investment scam.
Bitfinex and Tether wanted to legitimize the use of Tethers, so they found one guy, Matuszewski, they knew was in a position to help them do so. They actually set aside a relatively tiny slice of capital (a few million out of 3 billion) and treated him the way they should be treating all customers but weren't. Then they let him loose on the talk circuits to tell the world of the sheer upstanding nature and legitimacy of Tether.
This is exactly the kind of stuff Madoff did.
Audit, or gtfo. (To Tether, Inc. not you of course)
The reason being is that I want to keep my capital pegged to the dollar, but need something that's native to the Ethereum blockchain. If there's a trading opportunity, I need the ability to swap Tether for [X] token in a single blockchain transaction. There's no time to route actual dollar deposits from a real bank.
Considering that there's something like $13 billion locked in all the various defi protocols, that's a lot of potential demand for stable coins.