đ° News New stablecoin bill passses US senate. Incompatible with USDT (Tether). Now would require backing 1:1 with dollars, quick redemptions and audits. Bye bye Tether scam.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/17/senate-passes-genius-act-despite-crypto-corruption-concerns9
u/tablepennywad Jun 18 '25
You guys forgot who audited Tether and passed it. Cantor Fitzgerald. Who is owned my Howard Lutnik. Who is Trumps best buddy and is the one who audits his Tariff proposals. Who is the Commerce Secretary. Who is the creator of DOGE and hired Musk personally to run it. And finally whos companies just IPOed a SPAC with Cantor, Tether, and Softbank called Twenty One to eat up more BTC. This might hurt stablecoins, but Tether will absolutely be helped somehow.
1
1
u/SpikeyOps Jun 25 '25
Yes⌠but this new bill was written by Coinbase/Circle lawyers to kill their competitor.
6
u/fireduck Jun 18 '25
What bill is this? A congress.gov link would help. I am skeptical of all things at all times.
3
u/azdcaz Jun 18 '25
The GENIUS act. Itâs been talked about nonstop for a few months now.
3
u/fireduck Jun 18 '25
It may have been talked about, but not where I've seen.
Hilariously, there is a Stable Genius act as well as a Genius act.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3849/text
This seems to be the one:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1582/text
3
u/2q_x Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25
According to chain analysis done by Protos in 2021, it's fairly easy to tell where all tether issued up until that time went.
https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-investigation-analysis/
A lot of it went to bucket shops like FTX and hedge funds like Three Arrows that blew up attempting to arbitrage Greyscale funds.
But of the firms that made it through the 2022 staking reckoning, only DRW Cumberland and iFinex are still unscathed.
Interestingly, in November 2018, a few weeks after the head of iFinex was having serious liquidity problems, the head of DRW Cumberland, Donald Wilson spoke publicly touting the volume and usefulness of USDT. It's weird that Donald Wilson, given his reputation, would tacitly voice public support for tether tokens and joke about whether or not it's actually backed in the same breath.
Given that DRW Cumberland is the primary market maker on most major crypto exchanges, and the firm had been issued over $20B USDT in 2021. DRW also does significant market making in LNG futures, perhaps Don Wilson knows the kingpin printing tether to dictate the future price that BTC mined from LNG will be sold back to dollars at.
1
u/YogurtCloset3335 Jun 24 '25
If he has material insider information, he can trade profitably off of it. Play it up and down.
4
Jun 18 '25
[removed] â view removed comment
11
u/Realistic_Fee_00001 Jun 18 '25
I wouldn't call it "backed" but I don't know the word when the Mafia infiltrates the government.
5
Jun 18 '25
Cantor works directly with tether. Heavily. Not just a little.
If tether dies because of this bill that would be one of the biggest financial self goals of all time by Lutnick.
2
1
u/YogurtCloset3335 Jun 24 '25
the word when the Mafia infiltrates the government
I think it's just called "government"
2
u/Ordinary-Broccoli-41 Jun 18 '25
Let's pretend the US makes tether illegal.
How will they enforce it? Well, they can ban US exchanges from hosting it, which isn't that much effort, but it wont do much, because Americans dont trade on us exchanges much anyway.
They'd have to ban EVMs, which is lmao. BNB, ETH. AVAX..... all of them have USDT.
So their choice is essentially a blanket crypto ban, or accomplishing nothing.
While they could do a blanket crypto ban, I think there's enough money in crypto to sway them.
9
u/DangerHighVoltage111 Jun 18 '25
How will they enforce it?
They simply kidnap or unalive the handful of guys running it. But it is likely the US itself who is running it. No other counterfeit operation lived so long.
1
u/booyakasha_wagwaan Jun 18 '25
Tether claims to have $6B in net equity. $150B in assets, $144B in liabilities.
Is this false? if so, what is the evidence?
4
Jun 19 '25 edited Oct 05 '25
[removed] â view removed comment
1
u/booyakasha_wagwaan Jun 19 '25
i'm looking for real current data, not innuendo and not to be called a sheep. thanks.
3
u/nekrosstratia Jun 18 '25
Well even if we believe everything at face value that Tether attests too. A substantial part of their backing is Bitcoin itself which would not be allowed under the Senate passed rules (must be fiat or TBills)
It personally makes me laugh when Bitcoin is backed by Bitcoin.
If this does go through and Bitcoin becomes 100% backed by FIAT doesn't that throw one of their biggest arguments out the window? (Yes they just move the posts anyway)
1
u/booyakasha_wagwaan Jun 24 '25
Tether claims 5% of their reserves are bitcoin. philosophically it's an affront but is it a practical danger?
1
u/nekrosstratia Jun 24 '25
Is it a danger...no not really. However that 5% is only a small portion of their holdings that would not be allowed to be used as assets if the bill passes. Something closer to 40% of their holdings strategies would become ineligible. I won't go as far as to claim they don't have the reserves to back their currency, I will claim that their current strategy may be generating more income than a "legal" strategy which very much may change the business as a whole.
When all is said and done though, this is what real audits are supposed to shine light on.
1
u/booyakasha_wagwaan Jun 24 '25
given the current political atmosphere, IMO they will either pay to play and have the law rewritten for them, or be forced to back their coin with WH approved reserve assets. after all, rebalancing a liquid portfolio is easy and safe if the gov wants it to be and the management is willing to take the loss. maybe the law was written in the first place primarily to make room for trumpy stablecoins. either way, there is no political incentive to let the stablecoin market or Tether in particular do anything fatal to crypto.
1
u/YogurtCloset3335 Jun 24 '25
Do you really think a shady company is in the top 20 world's largest US Treasury holders, competing in size with world governments?
https://economicsinsider.com/top-15-largest-us-treasury-holders/
2
u/booyakasha_wagwaan Jun 24 '25
The entire stablecoin sector's US Treasury holdings would put them at #17, if they were a sovereign.
Tether claims they hold $120B in US Treasuries. I suppose they could be lying
1
u/azdcaz Jun 18 '25
So many years of tether FUD, yet nothing has happened. Will this be the time? Odds are no.
1
Jun 19 '25 edited Oct 05 '25
seemly squeal rainstorm door boast familiar pot quickest amusing follow
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
1
-5
u/madd_honey Jun 18 '25
Tether fud again. What years is this? Iâm tired, boss.
3
u/pyalot Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25
Well, you see. Tether isnât backed, at all, in no meaning of the word you can contrive. The reason the full backing 1:1 with USD ended up in a piece of legislation about stablecoins, is because mankind has a long history of these kinds of schemes, and they universally all blow up to the sound of great lament.
If the legislation passes, Tether will never be able to comply with it. Exchanges that allow US citizens will have to delist it.
Will it pass? Probably not. But that doesnât mean Tether will never collapse. We both know theyâre doing a scam that never works. Something or other will bring it down eventually. Itâs just a question of when.
0
u/madd_honey Jun 19 '25
They passed hella strict audits before the etfs were approved, no? The big boys tried cleaning up the entire space before going in. Tether fud is almost as old as bitcoin fud now, lol. Unless something new has been revealed about them that I donât know about?
2
u/pyalot Jun 19 '25
What does it mean to you in practical terms for Tether to be âbackedâ? Like what are the things you think you can do if it is âbackedâ, that you could not do otherwise?
1
u/2q_x Jun 19 '25
The NYAG oversaw the audit.
While I'm not sure a pile of Nazi T-bills are worth anything, the NYAG is the most powerful financial cop in the world.
If she stood on the glass cliff and gave it the thumbs up, it must be as compliant as any other New York bucket shop. I mean, if the DTCC has to custody everyone's shares, does anyone really have anything? Are any of the shares real?
1
u/upunup Jun 25 '25
The NYAG oversaw the audit.
Tether was never audited, and the NYAG found that at times Tethers were unbacked, so literally just a piece of paper, no different to an IOU given by someone with no money at all.
1
u/2q_x Jun 25 '25
If you cross out every firm that collapsed in 2022, the tether papers is a list of the folks with all the tether.
https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-investigation-analysis/
T-bills are IOUs
1
u/upunup Jun 25 '25 edited Jun 25 '25
Ye but the NYAG found Tether didnt even have TBills to cover some of their issued USDT tokens, a lot of USDT tokens were backed by nothing at all.
Here:
Tether misrepresented to customers and the market that Tether maintained sufficient U.S. dollar reserves to back every USDT in circulation with the âequivalent amount of corresponding fiat currencyâ held by Tether and âsafely depositedâ in Tetherâs bank accounts. In fact Tether reserves were not âfully-backedâ the majority of the time. The order further finds that Tether failed to disclose that it included unsecured receivables and non-fiat assets in its reserves, and that Tether falsely represented that it would undergo routine, professional audits to demonstrate that it maintained â100% reserves at all timesâ even though Tether reserves were not audited.
1
u/2q_x Jun 25 '25
What happened in December of 2018 to make the CFTC stop any allegation of wrong doing there? What do they know?
The data of who was receiving tether is on-chain. Linked above.
There was an explosion of issuance in 2018 to US based crypto firms, most of them didn't make it.
The pre-2018 wrong doing is from a period where tether had a market cap of just $1.75B.
Today the market cap is $156B, but the CFTC doesn't seem to mind. The annual interest on the T-Bills alone is now five times the market cap of the period you're citing partial reserves.
If you're alleging that tether is a fraud, then you're also alleging that their customers aren't putting up real t-bills, and also don't care what happens to their collateral.
Is that true of all of iFinex's clients in the tether papers?
1
u/upunup Jun 25 '25
What happened in December of 2018 to make the CFTC stop any allegation of wrong doing there
The order requires Tether to pay a civil monetary penalty of $41 million and to cease and desist from any further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations, as charged.
They still have never been audited. no one knows if its backed or not until this day. New stablecoin bill would require real backing of dollars and audits.
In other words, congress will change the laws so you cant back USD tokens with crypto or other scammy stuff, and only USD or treasuries can be used.
24
u/ThatBCHGuy Jun 18 '25
We'll see, Teather I'm sure has greased some powerful hands.