(Illustration: Camille Charbonneau)
KEYS TO CRYPTO. The hunt for the next FTX has begun! After Forbes magazine’s accusation against Binance, which the CEO of the crypto platform considers defamatory, another media institution attacks another Web3.0 giant: “Cryptocurrency companies behind Tether used fake documents and shell companies to obtain bank accounts,” accuses The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). .
For reference, Tether (USDT) is the name of the first stablecoin on the planet by market cap ($71 billion), a cryptocurrency that is supposed to reflect the price of the US dollar on the blockchain. USDT even surpasses Bitcoin in terms of its daily trading volumes. Also responding to the name of Tether is the company that manages the release of this digital currency (as well as a subsidiary of Bitfinex, one of the largest crypto exchanges known for its phenomenal hack.
It makes sense that this crypto giant has an existential connection to the traditional banking system. However, the WSJ’s dive into Tether’s internal emails and documents will demonstrate a longstanding determination to keep these paradoxical financial connections alive in the bitcoin universe. And this is at any cost.
This brings to light troubling elements that some, without further ado, have linked to incidents of fraud or money laundering. “Some of their backers have turned to dubious intermediaries using false documents and bogus companies,” the WSJ claims.
One of these intermediaries, a major Tether broker in China, attempted to “bypass the banking system by providing fake invoices and fake contracts for every deposit and withdrawal,” according to one of the owners of Tether Holdings. OOO
Destabilization tactics?
Another attack with FUD, this vilification technique that combines fear, uncertainty and doubt, insulted Tether in a press release. It would have been headlined by the Wall Street Journal as “statements outdated, grossly inaccurate and misleading.”
The crypto firm boasts “world-class” compliance programs and claims to comply with all applicable anti-money laundering (AML), customer identification (KYC) and anti-money laundering legal requirements. Tether even puts forward its acquittal request, citing assistance provided “regularly and voluntarily” to the US Department of Justice.
In this brief response, we find defensive arguments similar to those recently put forward by Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, namely the fact that it has “stood the test of time” in which “users have made secure transactions worth billions of dollars.”
In any case, Tether assures that these “unfair attacks” from the media will not distract its teams from their efforts to offer the most liquid and reliable stablecoin, “which the market has clearly recognized, making us the leaders of the sector.”
It’s worth wondering about another aspect of this FTX or Celsius Syndrome, if you will: the media has so far tended to glorify crypto players who took huge risks, even cheating users before blowing up. Are financial, accounting, and managerial secrets so illegible in the bitcoin industry? Are these diseases of the youth of the emerging ecosystem? Could the Caisse de depot du Québec and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan have avoided the wrong investment? A business to watch…