> Our reserve holdings are published daily and subject to frequent professional audits. All tethers in circulation always match our reserves.
They've been around for years and the grand total of independents audits is 0 (zero).
Sure, assumptions don't make rumors true but them flat-out lying about audits and transparency speaks louder than anything else and we're not even getting into how it took the Panama papers leak for the public to find out that several of the people in charge of Tether and the people in charge of Bitfinex being the same.
“We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.” - Tether spokesperson
See https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-and-tether-is-unaudi...
It is the most clear cut indicator that there is some super sketchy shit going on ever.
People seem to be willing to believe whatever they want despise clear signs they are wrong. Especially when there is the possibility of getting lambo-rich with Bitcoin....
Yes, there is something that they're hiding, but there is no evidence that this has anything to do with their 1:1 USD reserve being a bogus. It's far more likely they are encountering regulation problems given the regulation uncertainty surrounding crypto.
>People seem to be willing to believe whatever they want despise clear signs they are wrong.
Or perhaps I'm not willing to commit to conspiracy theories based on baseless speculations.
In fairness, I can kind of understand the bind: it seems that use-case of tethers depends on not being a legally enforceable claim to dollars, specifically so they can't legally be regulated as such (which would trigger reporting requirements, accreditation as a money transmitter, etc). But that's a double-edged sword: it also means that no (ethical) auditor will sign off on a statement saying they legally own the assets they claim to have.
An interesting fact is that all of the original RealCoin/Tether founders (Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, Craig Sellars) are now associated with a pair of connected blockchain startups: BLOCKV[1] and vAtomic[2].
[2]: https://www.vatomic.io/ (this is, incidentally, another of vAtomic's founders, "accused of paying $2.5 million of bribes to two technology executives at the bank, so they would arrange $10.4 million of contracts to inflate his company’s revenue." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-servicemesh-cba-bribery/e...)
Huh? They did do audits https://tether.to/announcement-transparency-update/ and they don't say they must be as public or as comprehensive as the community demands.
> These consulting services do not constitute anaudit or attestation engagement
They're saying themselves that they weren't audited.
>Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success."
