I think so too however it looks like they may have printed their (counterfeited) way into solvency.
Basically: buy cheap BTCs, print shitload of tethers, sell BTCs for real USD to the tune of tens of billions and now store these real USD in short term US treasuries (they don't own chinese treasuries anymore) bringing in 5% and more.
They're claiming they now have excess money (!) to back their tether due to the fact that they collect 5% or more of interest on the short-term treasuries they have.
Put it this way: even if they printed $40bn out of their arses out of $80bn of tether, the $40bn of actual USD they'd have would still net them $2bn a year in interest. That'd still be a big hole but...
What if they printed "only" 10 bn out of thin air out of 80 bn: they'd have near 70 bn bringing in 3.5 bn yearly at the moment.
They don't give any of the interest back to USDT (tether) holders.
So if they printed "only" 10 bn out of their arses, in less than three years they'd have these 10 bn for real on interest alone.
It's still criminal (I guess) but it may not be "0% of tether are backed".
People have tried to run the maths on how much money entered the cryptocurrency world (with Coinbase giving a huge hint).
Centre (Circle+Coinbase) has really $24 bn backing their USDC coin (they publish the individual US short term treasuries bill number).
USDT (tether) is much older than USDC.
Did they cheat? Most certainly.
Did they "fake it 'till they made it", helped, by sheer luck, by interest rates going like crazy?
Tether absolutely had the chance to become solvent in the weekend of the SVB collapse. In that time, everyone was rushing out of USDC and DAI into Tether (USDT). Liquidity pools were drained of all their USDT and smartcontracts showed all available units being borrowed at 100+% APR. Tether was trading for $1.01-$1.10 that entire weekend, with demand insatiable. They could have repeatedly issued new Tethers and sold them for more than a dollar[1], while only incurring a dollar of liabilities.
Coinmarket cap shows the USDT market cap going up by about $2 billion during that weekend, but it's not clear if they were using this strategy. (which would have profited ~1-10% of that figure).
[1] or, depending on how much risk they wanted to take, traded them for USDC and DAI! Those were trading for as little as $0.90.
The ETF will have to be approved BEFORE Tether is brought down. The powers that be need a way to control the price, an ETF is the easiest but until then they have Tether.
Why else would the US allow the largest counterfeit money printer to continue for long?
