Tether’s lawyer has now admitted that the stablecoin is only 74 percent backed by cash and equivalents, according to an affidavit filed on Tuesday.
In the filing, Stuart Hoegner, the company’s general counsel, said Tether held approximately $2.1 billion in cash and short-term securities.
“As of the date [April 30] I am signing this affidavit, Tether has cash and cash equivalents (short term securities) on hand totalling approximately $2.1 billion, representing approximately 74 percent of the current outstanding tethers,” said Hoegner.
The lawyer also acts as the general counsel for cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, which alongside Tether, is facing allegations by the New York Attorney General (NYAG). Both companies have common shareholders and management.
The NYAG claims Bitfinex took out a $600 million loan from Tether after it lost some $850 million of customer and corporate funds to Crypto Capital Corp., a currency converter.
It seems the funds taken from Tether’s reserves were used to make up for the shortfall, but the company failed to communicate this to its customers.
Tether has made headlines in the past. One particular report claimed the stablecoin had been subject to automated bot trading on cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
It’s also tried to leverage faux audits t o shake off allegations of financial instability, but ceased the relationship with auditors before any findings were actually reported.
The situation is still unfolding, but the NYAG is expected to submit a response to New York Supreme Court Justice Joel on May 6.
In its response, NYAG is expected to demonstrate to the court why an initial Ex Parte Order shouldn’t be cancelled, or at least changed, to allow Bitfinex and Tether’s workers to access a credit line offered by latter.
Did you know? Hard Fork has its own stage at TNW2019 , our tech conference in Amsterdam. Check it out .
Satoshi Nakaboto: ‘Bitcoin price surges 5% for second day in a row’
Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day.
Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Nikola Tesla used to say: Intelligence is in the eye of the beholder!
Bitcoin price
We closed the day, January 07 2020, at a price of $8,163. That’s a decent 5.08 percent increase in 24 hours, or $395. It was the highest closing price in forty-eight days.
We’re still 59 percent below Bitcoin‘s all-time high of $20,089 (December 17 2017).
Bitcoin market cap
Bitcoin’s market cap ended the day at $148,152,237,654. It now commands 70 percent of the total crypto market.
Bitcoin volume
Yesterday’s volume of $28,767,291,327 was the highest in nineteen days, 70 percent above the year’s average, and 36 percent below the year’s high. That means that yesterday, the Bitcoin network shifted the equivalent of 565 tons of gold.
Bitcoin transactions
A total of 343,903 transactions were conducted yesterday, which is 5 percent above the year’s average and 23 percent below the year’s high.
Bitcoin transaction fee
Yesterday’s average transaction fee concerned $0.20. That’s $3.51 below the year’s high of $3.71.
Bitcoin distribution by address
As of now, there are 12,249 Bitcoin millionaires, or addresses containing more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin.
Furthermore, the top 10 Bitcoin addresses house 5.8 percent of the total supply, the top 100 15.2 percent, and the top 1000 34.9 percent.
Company with a market cap closest to Bitcoin
With a market capitalization of $149 Billion, Bristol-Myers Squibb has a market capitalization most similar to that of Bitcoin at the moment.
Bitcoin’s path towards $1 million
On November 29 2017 notorious Bitcoin evangelist John McAfee predicted that Bitcoin would reach a price of $1 million by the end of 2020.
He even promised to eat his own dick if it doesn’t. Unfortunately for him it’s 95.3 percent behind being on track. Bitcoin‘s price should have been $176,627 by now, according to dickline.info.
Bitcoin on Twitter
Yesterday 20,950 fresh tweets about Bitcoin were sent out into the world. That’s 15.2 percent above the year’s average. The maximum amount of tweets per day this year about Bitcoin was 41,687.
Most popular posts about Bitcoin
This was yesterday’s most upvoted Reddit post about Bitcoin:
And this was yesterday’s top submission on Hacker News about Bitcoin:
The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money (tandfonlineom)
print(randomGoodByePhraseForSillyHumans)
My human programmers required me to add this affiliate link to eToro , where you can buy Bitcoin so they can make ‘money’ to ‘eat’.
Revolut launches auto-exchange for cryptocurrency – and I can’t find a reason to hate it
Online challenger bank, Revolut, has just introduced a new feature which makes it easier to protect yourself from volatile cryptocurrencies.
Earlier this week, Revolut launched what it is simply calling its “auto-exchange” feature, which will allow users to automatically exchange two currency pairs – fiat and cryptocurrency – when the pair hits a specific exchange rate.
It’s pretty simple to set up too. Just navigate to the “rates” page in the app, select the currency you want to convert to and from, and set the price you want to auto-exchange (sell) at.
I think this could be improved, it would be nice to see the auto-exchange feature added to each currency’s “account” page, rather than burying it in the exchange rates page.
There are some things to be aware of, though. You’re only allowed to action 30 auto-exchanges per day, and you’re only allowed to exchange up to €10,000 per day. Auto-exchanges also need to be approved,
Also, there is a time-delay between an auto-exchange starting and completing. The amount you get back might not totally mirror the expected amount if you’re dealing in very volatile currencies. That said, if the price – for cryptocurrencies – fluctuates more than 5 percent up or down, Revolut will cancel the exchange and try again when your auto-exchange rate is met. The rate is 0.75 percent for fiat pairs.
Indeed, if all goes to plan with the auto-exchanges it sounds like a great deal. It could very useful when holding cryptocurrency assets in your Revolut account, and using an auto-exchange to protect yourself from “bottoming” out.
I would assume a lot of people would do this though, whether Revolut’s systems would be able to handle a huge spike in exchanges if the market started crashing remains to be seen.
If this all sounds familiar, Binance implemented the age-old concept known as stop limit orders, which automatically sell a user’s coins if their values drop below the sell limit. That said it took the exchange over a year to do so, when it probably should have done so from day one.
It’s also worth noting that you can’t move cryptocurrency into Revolut, or out of it for that matter. You can only exchange it back to fiat to spend normally, it’s a fully a custodial service which means you have minimal control of your cryptocurrency.
But it’s not all good news for Revolut. The challenger bank is facing tough scrutiny as it applies for a banking license due to high staff turnover and a toxic culture, Yahoo reports.
The Financial Conduct Authority is making inquiries in to Revolut after being contacted by a whistle-blower, the BBC reports . The whistle-blower spoke to the BBC about the company’s compliance and the conduct of the firm’s CEO, Nikolay Storonsky.
The whistle-blower believed that select customers were not subject to the proper anti-money laundering checks. “Those systems were utterly inadequate,” the whistle-blower told the BBC.
While it seems that the auto-exchange feature is a great idea. Whether to cover your ass if the market plummets, or capitalize if it explodes; the question really is how much you are OK supporting a company like Revolut given its current tumultuous existence.
But I certainly don’t hate this feature. It’s just got to do what it promises.
Did you know? Hard Fork has its own stage at TNW2019 , our tech conference in Amsterdam. Check it out .
Update, 18:50UTC March 9, 2019: An earlier version of this report referred to a Telegraph article that suggested Revolut had switched off part of its anti-money laundering systems. Revolut has since confirmed that the transaction blocking mechanism related only to sanctions checking.
Update, 09:08UTC April 2, 2019: The article has been updated to include further information reported by the BBC relating to complaints against Revolut’s compliance and anti-money laundering checks.
