Tether Addresses the Tether Conspiracy Theories an Offers Updates

Tether Claims that Tether Conspiracy Theories are FUD, that They Can Prove it, and that Tether is Getting Some Exciting Updates

A lot of conspiracy theories were going around about Tether. Tether addressed these theories and ensured everyone that they Tethers are backed 1:1 by dollars and they have been audited.

Further, Tether explained its audit process and explained why full audits were not public.

Further, Tether made some exciting new announcements (like Litecoin network based Tethers being test which have near zero fees and tests of Tether on the Lightening Network; both are a big deal).

In other words, it is very like the anti-Tether news everyone heard was FUD, that Tether is real and useful, and that Tether grants were a response to demand (not an attempt to prop up Bitcoin’s price).

If FUD like this could drop the price of crypto, expect that squashing of that FUD to have an equal opposite effect to some degree.

See: the official “Tether Update” for Tether’s side of the story. Below are some important citations.

Auditors

We are aware of online discussions about Tether’s lack of publicly-available audits. Periodic audits of our bank balances have been performed by the Taiwan-based auditing firm TOPSUN CPAs & Co. The results of those audits were for the benefit of shareholders and were not in a form suitable for public consumption (to begin with, they were in Mandarin). Nonetheless, we have asked them to prepare the following attestations (PDFs linked) in English, for release to the community, covering December 31, 2016; January 31,2017; February 28, 2017; and, March 31, 2017. As we are no longer banking in Taiwan, and given that we are achieving substantial scale, we have engaged Friedman, LLP, in New York, to perform comprehensive balance sheet audits on a quarterly basis going back to Dec 31, 2016. We will share those results with you as they become available in the coming weeks or months.

 

Solvency

We have also read online about many outlandish conspiracy theories suggesting that Tether is not backed 1:1 by currency on deposit with banking institutions. Any such claim is unequivocally false, and the audits will bear that out. Our Terms of Service have been carefully picked apart by various malcontents and twisted to suggest that Tethers would not be redeemable for currency on some bizarre, malicious whim by Tether. That is untrue. While we reserve the right not to redeem for any particular customer, as we must, we will not do so for no reason. We have a duty to try to ensure that our service is not being used by persons from sanctioned countries, that is otherwise on a sanctions list, or that has some background check problem. In short, redemptions will not be unreasonably denied, but we reserve the right to selectively deny redemption and creation of Tethers on a case-by-case basis. As such, this policy, which is necessary from a regulatory perspective, has no bearing on our presentation of the liabilities of the company. The company considers all tethers outstanding to be liabilities for presentation on the balance sheet for which there is always an equivalent amount (or greater) held in assets to back those presented liabilities. Full stop.

In other words, if you trust Tether’s word, the FUD spreaders arguably just got “Tether’ed.” Half joking, we still need to see some more transparency from Tether, but given the FUD going around, this was a very welcomed and quick step toward squashing fears and worries.