from Hacker News

Top stablecoins shed $7B in May as traders redeem tokens en masse

by DogOfTheGaps on 5/22/22, 4:57 AM with 366 comments

• by Animats on 5/22/22, 6:50 AM

  The big question with Tether has been, if they are holding commercial paper, whose commercial paper? Traders who deal in commercial paper of real companies that do real stuff don't see Tether present in that market. The dollar amounts are too big to hide. The suspicion is that their "commercial paper" is high-interest loans to other cryptocurrency companies. With the whole crypto sector in decline, those loans are at risk.

  This is how you get a 2008-type crash - loans which seem to be unrelated but are tied to a common market.

  About 11% of Tether has been cashed out in the last month.

  The real problem for Tether is simple. Why would anyone buy Tether at this point? There's zero upside potential, after all. And the competition, USDC and GUSD, looks better backed. So a steady outflow is to be expected. We're going to find out how strong their backing is.

  Watch out for heavily promoted Tether-based "staking" schemes designed to prevent cash-out.

• by OtomotO on 5/22/22, 6:46 AM

  The moment I learned that people want to buy crypto as a means to get rich in (evil ;)) fiat money, I knew I had a ponzi scheme in front of me.

  The interesting idea behind crypto once was to have a totally different system.

  Yet in reality, with greedy apes on a spacerock, it was an unreachable Utopia

• by TekMol on 5/22/22, 6:44 AM

  What are people holding all those stable coins for?

  In contrast to other crypto currencies, nobody is holding it for speculation. I doubt anybody expects stable coins to be a better store of "dollar value" than the dollar itself.

  Yet, someone holds those $150B worth of stable coins. Who and why?

• by esquire_900 on 5/22/22, 6:34 AM

  Clickbait title it seems; USDT and DAI lost some market share while BUSD and USDC have grown more.

  > USDC has grown 20% with $10.6 billion more tokens in circulation. BUSD boosted up 22% — representing growth of $4.2 billion. USDT has shed about $4.1 billion, a 5% reduction, while DAI dwindled by 30% — from $8.9 billion to $6.2 billion.

• by bitcharmer on 5/22/22, 6:37 AM

  It seems we have a serious problem with the first generation of cryptocurrencies being mainly a vehicle for scams and otherwise extracting value from gullible people.

  From what I've seen so far in most cases "stable-" isn't really stable and currency definitely doesn't work like one.

  Or am I just biased by sourcing my information from HN and only seeing the cases where crypto crashes and burns instead of all the successful ones no one here is talking about. Are there any?

• by luka-birsa on 5/22/22, 4:28 PM

  I really wonder if USDT bashing will get old or will people finally get that USDT will not just disappear overnight. They've redeemed 11% of their total capitalization and nothing happened.

  I despise shady accounting practices and I'm sure Tether is on par with a good american financial institution, but I highly doubt it they will ever default.

  I know it's a long shot, but hear me out:

  1. Their redemption process can be handled in a way to prevent an uncontrolled bank run. You can redeem 100.000 minimum, hence it's a not a retail bank run for sure. 2. They print the dollars for much of the old school crypto ecosystem, with all players acknowledging their importance. So unless the key players in the field want to take USDT down, it's not going down. Even the NYAG tried and gave them a penny fine instead.

  And even the article here really lacks context. The USDT reedeming right now is tied to all the negative publicity in the media. I've traded through this current depeg (a week ago), that was purely speculative and generated by the panic. A twitter thread stared to report a depeg, and more and more people piled on the exchanges to swap USDT for BUSD and USDC. In the end a lot of USDT was redeemed, nothing happened, expect that some people made a lot of money on the panic itself (and the premium).

  I've been hearing the same story for the past 6 years. USDT will fail, they don't have any backing, US will shut them down,.... And the world keeps on turning. Sorry to break it to you. Nothing is going to happen until key crypto players have a legit alternative that will keep the ecosystem alive.

• by ww520 on 5/22/22, 8:14 AM

  The collateral for DAI are hihgly crypto correlated - 43.8% USDC, 32.1% ETH, 11.3% WBTC, 5.9% USDP, and others. ETH and WBTC are just Ethereum and BTC, both of which have dropped considerably recently. USDP somehow dropped to ~$0 since April. USDC is sworn to be 100% USD backed so let's take that at face value.

  DAI is said to have 150% over-collateralization. ETH & WBTC have dropped more than half. Let's say just off by 50%. USDP and others seem got wiped out. $150 x (43.8% + 32.1%/2 + 11.3%/2 + 0%) = ~$98. That means $150 of collateral is worth only ~$98 now, not enough to back $100 of DAI for 1-to-$1 redemption.

  Looks like DAI is at the verge of de-pegging.

• by ur-whale on 5/22/22, 6:32 AM

  Is $7B a lot?

  Isn't Tether's cap alone around 10 times that?

  Is this an observable trend or just a small spike of an otherwise generally volatile phenomenon?

• by taspeotis on 5/22/22, 10:28 AM

  Look I am very ignorant about all this stuff but ... is there any downside to shorting a stablecoin? Please be gentle with me:

  Like if you short it and the price doesn't move (by design) are you out any money?

  The price won't go up (by design) because nobody's going to spend too much money from their reserves to support a price over US$1.

  But it's possible for the reserves to run dry in which case the price goes down and you win.

• by jsemrau on 5/22/22, 9:52 AM

  I read about this last week [1] and am still quite perplexed about Tether and its a backing. If you look at the redemption pattern you can see large movements. I.e. a whale must be withdrawing funds. This really reminds me of 2008.

  [1] https://app.finclout.io/t/kVr06N0

• by davidgerard on 5/22/22, 10:47 AM

  There is no evidence that the tether was redeemed for anything.

  We know from the CFTC settlement, and statements from Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, that Tether Inc has a history of issuing tethers and then accounting the loan itself as the backing for the issuance - literally just printing pseudo-money out of thin air.

  I would first presume the tether "redemptions" were just cancellations of these loans. No dollars or other consideration left Tether Inc.

• by moonbug on 5/22/22, 9:59 AM

  it's telling that the value change in these things is always denominated in USD. it's almost as if they don't have any intrinsic value.

• by can16358p on 5/22/22, 8:24 AM

  Well, staying stable in these times is good (as opposed to Luna/UST). This is battle testing and future-proofing stability to some extent.

  And honestly 4% is nothing in crypto world.

• by 1-6 on 5/22/22, 6:33 AM

  Do Kwon and the Terra Luna fiasco

• by Jamie9912 on 5/22/22, 6:39 AM

  I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. But I like to think in terms of use cases. Currently there is no way to send "money" to someone in another country on the other side of the world, in a decentralized way, and without transaction fees.

  Can this problem be solved without crypto? Probably, but currently crypto is looking like the best way to be able to do this.