> reserves were not all in cash and all in a bank account titled in Tether’s name, at all times

Truly a bizarre statement for Tether to make. are they counting bank accounts in other people’s names? How would that affect the question at hand.

This sounds like junkie logic.

If I recall, one Tether executive was holding a good portion of the “reserves” in his personal bank account.

How it is that Tether trades on par with trustworthy alternatives like USDC, Paxos and Gemini, I have no idea.

Yeah, it's in the NYAG settlement I linked as [3]. At one point, all their money was in Stuart Hoegner's personal Bank of Montreal account (#17 in [3]).

Hoegner (their GC) was the director of compliance at Excapsa, the parent company of the wildly non-compliant Ultimate Bet. That online poker site had a back door where some of their friends could see other poker players cards [1]

[1] https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/03/27/before-bitfinex-and-te...

In their defense, they probably thought this whole Tether thing would have imploded by now, and they needed to be ready to make their getaway.

I think it's strange as well. There's all this uncertainty surrounding USDT. Why won't people switch to the other stable coins? Makes no sense. USDT markets still have the most liquidity and the peg remains unbroken.

"All[1] of our[2] coins are backed[3] one-to-one[4] by USD[5]".

[1] Not really though

[2] Yours really

[3] Not in a way you'd think

[4] Approx but we can't tell you exactly how much

[5] ish

[6] also it doesn't matter because we get to decide who, if anyone, is allowed to redeem - and on what schedule - and should we feel like it, what we give you. Also US persons are never allowed to redeem. This is all in their terms of service. Their backing really doesn't matter because they're not obligated by anyone to ever give it out.

> are they counting bank accounts in other people’s names?

yes, it was a personal account in the name of iFinex general counsel Stuart Hoegner.

And various holdings at non-banks, e.g. the $850m that disappeared at Crypto Capital Corp.

> Tether: "As to the Tether reserves, there is no finding that tether tokens were not fully backed at all times—simply that the reserves were not all in cash and all in a bank account titled in Tether’s name, at all times."

So, they were fully backed by dollars, except some of those dollars were not-dollars, and some of those dollars and not-dollars were not actually owned by the entity that was supposedly backing tether?

the $850M number you're talking about is the amount that Bitfenix gave Tether through Crypto Capital to cover for losses and/or missing money. the $18.5M was the fine they paid the NYAG for covering up that transaction.

That's the amount that Bitfinex took from Tether to remain solvent after the $850M was seized from Crypto Capital Corp in the money laundering sting. Bitfinex wrote them an IOU for it. But of course that money didn't exist anymore, it was taken by various world governments, and BFX and Tether have the same owners.

Bitfinex and Tether are the same company, roughly speaking, and I do believe they co-mingled their funds at times.

This is covered in section III of the NYAG settlement [3].

Depends how you slice it I guess.

Have there been any updates on where the $850m that’s been seized is sitting?

Do we know the money was actually seized? Last I’d heard the Tether (or maybe Bitfinex?) CEO had told the NYAG office the missing $850 million kept in a Panama(?) bank had been seized in an AML sting but I’m not sure whether that story was ever corroborated?

$371m was seized by Poland: https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitfinex...

Haven't heard much specific about the rest, but there's supposed to be some tied up in Portugal, UK and USA.