Just a brief note I wanted to make about how Matt Leising is the personification of fakenews and gives journalists a bad name.

This man is allegedly a “financial journalist”:

Not ironic

A number of things are wrong with this tweet:

USDT does budge from $1. I have been arbitraging USDT/USD prices for years and it budges all the time due to liquidity preferences, i.e., people desperate to get into and out of USDT to take some other opportunity are willing to overpay in short-term. Just navigate over to the USDT/USD chart on Kraken to get an idea of how much the value really DOES fluctuate (in short term) https://cryptowat.ch/markets/kraken/usdt/usd/1h Demand “surges” for USDT in times like this in much the sense that demand for USD balances on exchanges “surges” when people sell crypto to get into USD. That does not mean that USDT price should be rising substantially versus USD USDT is highly demand elastic. So just because demand is surging, USDT has a 1:1 convertibiliy window with USD, which means if anywhere on the market USDT is at a premium (or discount) to USD, then the price difference can be arbitraged.

Leising has a history of writing gossip and rumours in crypto without actually doing basic research to talk to traders or exchanges to understand what is really going on in these markets (see e.g., https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tether-kraken-trades/ ).

The only thing worse than stupidity is stupidiy and arrogance. So when confronted by traders with some reality, Leising recoils and responds, in essence, “Google me, bro”:

Fake news

Yes, Matt. A dollar does equal a dollar, you fucking moron.

Since he does not do his job and talk to actual traders, let me try to shed light on this. Here are some facts to understand:

Tether is redeemable for $1, with 1:1 USD backing of token supply. The assets are held at a known full reserve bank that has 24/7 settlement of funds.

USDT is created by sending USD to Tether where you can get USDT 1:1. You can also send USDT and get USD 1:1. This is what is called a “convertiblity window” which means that you can always generate and contract supply to profit from any price discrepencies.

This makes it trivial to arbitrage any deviations all day every day.

This is how reality is on the ground. Please disregard fakenews produced by this Leising character who has no idea what is going on.