This is your regularly scheduled reminder that no US persons are permitted to redeem Tether according to their terms of service. Further according to their terms of service only designated customers are permitted to redeem Tether, they at their sole discretion make the determination as to who is the designated customer, they are permitted to delay redemptions arbitrarily, and they are permitted to fulfill redemptions in-kind with whatever garbage backing they may have instead of dollars. [1]
Their “reserves” and ratios and backing mean basically nothing since nobody’s ever going to be permitted to redeem a meaningful quantity anyways - while at the same time being too big to fail in the crypto industry. Exchanges know this.
They are chuck-e-cheese tokens used to facilitate capital flight from mainland China, and to provide 85% of all trading volume in the crypto space. $4.9B of BTC daily trade volume vs $0.17B for USD proper. [2]
[1] tether.to/legal