The price of bitcoin is headed back over $19,000 again. What will it take to push it past $20,000—more tethers? More institutional buying? Or maybe, more crypto journalists proclaiming (without evidence) that tethers are fully backed? Here’s the news:
MicroStrategy wants more, more, more
Michael Saylor, the new crazy god of bitcoin institutional buying, continues his bitcoin buying spree. He seems really, really confident the price of BTC will go up.
Saylor’s publicly traded company MicroStrategy currently owns 40,824 bitcoins—because no sense using all that excess cash for buying back a ton of stock or paying a big dividend. Better off to gamble it on crypto.
Now the firm is actually going into debt to buy bitcoin. After completing a $650 million bond offering, MicroStrategy plans to plow all the proceeds into buying more bitcoin. (Microstrategy PR, Cointelegraph)
Citibank isn’t impressed. Analyst Tyler Radke downgraded MicroStrategy (MSTR) from neutral to sell, calling the recent rally—MSTR went up after its first few BTC buying announcements—”overextended” and a possibly “deal-breaker” for software investors. (The Block)
Tether: Ain’t no stopping us now
Tether is now at $20 billion worth of tether—that’s assets, but circulating supply is soon to follow—and there is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that there is $20 billion in real cash behind all those tethers. Why? Because the company has never had a formal audit.
Still, last month, The Block’s Larry Cermak defended tethers as being “either fully backed or very, very close,” telling folks “everything is in order now.” He based that on conversations he claimed to have had with “third-parties” who told him they had successfully redeemed several hundred million in tethers.
Cermak is not the only one to buy the Tether line of B.S.
In December 2018, after looking at Tether bank statements, Bloomberg’s Matt Leising also reported that Tether appeared to be fully backed. He was wrong.
Unbeknownst to him at the time, in the previous two months, the DOJ froze five NY bank accounts belonging to Reginald Fowler, who ran a shadow banking service for Tether/Bitfinex’s Panamanian payment processor. And in November, the NYAG, having serious concerns about Tether’s finances, issued subpoenas to Bitfinex and Tether asking for details on their banking. Finally, in April 2019, Tether admitted it was only 74% backed. And that’s before it went off and printed another 17.5 billion tethers. So what’s backing all those?
In a recent blog post, David Gerard explains why Tether is “too big to fail.” Essentially, it’s keeping the entire BTC market afloat. If Tether were to get the Liberty Reserve treatment, the price of bitcoin is unlikely to ever recover.
Thus, “the purpose of the crypto industry, and all its little service sub-industries, is to generate a narrative—so as to maintain and enhance the flow of actual dollars from suckers, and keep the party going,” he said.
NYAG: Tether documents forthcoming
Meanwhile, there’s been a new document filing in the NYAG Tether probe.
In a letter to the NY supreme court, NYAG says Bitfinex/Tether are cooperating on document production and the parties expect to finalize things “in the coming weeks.” These documents, of course, consist of everything NYAG asked for in its original November 2018 subpoena—information that will shed light on the Tether and Bitfinex’s shadowy dealings since 2015.
A part of me wants to get excited about this news, but another part says, wait a minute. In the past when Tether’s operators said they were going to hand documents over, they simply handed over material that was already public information. They also have a long history of shenanigans, so let’s just wait and see.
How to turn USDT into cash
Jorge Stolfi, a computer scientist from Brazil, shared on Reddit a “mainstream theory” on what could be happening behind-the-scenes at Tether—specifically, how Tether’s operators could convert USDT into cash for their own personal use. Remember, this is totally unproven. It is just a theory. (The “triad,” by the way, refers to Tether CSO Phil Potter, CEO and man of mystery J.L. van der Velde, and CFO Giancarlo Devasini. They are the same operators behind sister company Bitfinex.)
He writes:
- The owners of Tether Inc (which I will call “the Triad”) print billions of USDT without any backing.
- The Triad deposits those USDT into Bitfinex (which they own too).
- The Triad uses those USDT to buy BTC and other cryptos from other Bitfinex clients, attracted by the better price.
- The Triad withdraws the BTC to their private wallets.
- The Triad moves all or some of those BTC to other exchanges that handle real currencies, such as USD, EUR, JPY, etc.
- The Triad sells those BTC for real money.
- The Triad withdraws the real money into their personal bank accounts.
This is a theory. This is not proven. But the point is, when you have no checks and balances in place along with massive loopholes in oversight, anything can happen. We saw this already with QuadrigaCX—the Canadian crypto exchange that went bankrupt after the founder disappeared (aka “died in India”), taking along with him hundreds of millions of dollars in customer funds.
Coinbase loses half critical security team
After NYT reporter Nathaniel Popper reported about discriminatory complaints at Coinbase, new information came out. Among those who recently resigned to protest the exchange’s new internal policies, were four of the seven people on Coinbase’s critical security team—aka the “key management team.”
The key management team is responsible for securing the cryptographic keys to Coinbase’s cold wallets, where the majority of the company’s crypto is held—somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion.
“No job is more fundamental to the company’s success,” Popper said.
Coinbase’s security chief shot back, saying Coinbase’s security team is managed by several teams with redundancy built in. Of course, he wants us to believe everything is fine, but not everyone is convinced.
MassMutual invests in BTC
Bitcoin has a new institutional investor: MassMutual. The Springfield-Mass insurance firm purchased $100 million worth of BTC for its general investment account, which totals $235 billion. (WSJ)
MassMutual purchased the bitcoin through NYDIG, a New York-based fund management company, which has $2.3 billion worth of crypto under management. MassMutual also acquired a $5 million minority equity stake in NYDIG.
The $100 million cash injection into bitcoin sounds like a lot, but it’s small potatoes. That money will cover the network’s operators—the bitcoin miners—for only six days. Remember, bitcoin miners are selling their 900 newly minted bitcoin per day for $17 million, at current BTC prices. Investors will never see that money again. Bitcoin doesn’t make any real profits on its own—just investor money going in one end, out the other.
Other news
Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith moves to dismiss his indictment—again. Attorney Brian Klein argues speech is a protected by the constitution. (Reply memo in support of motion to dismiss.)
Law firm Hogan Lovells is requesting to withdraw their representation of Reggie Fowler in a class-action against Bitfinex and Tether in which Fowler is also named. (Motion to withdraw)
Bryce Weiner has written a nice overview of how Tether works in relation to the crypto industry.
Crypto-friendly CFTC chair Heath Tarbert plans to resign early next year. His term was set to expire in 2024. (The Block)
Bitcoin’s right-libertarian anarcho-capitalism fits right in with far-right extremism. Crypto analyst Tone Vays brags on Twitter about spending a night with the Proud Boys.
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Amy Castor 