Binance, the largest crypto exchange of them all, has huge USDT holdings and is widely reckoned to be in deep trouble. However, they can't dump it without wrecking the market in the process.
One of the famous SBF screenshots showed Binance's CEO deeply concerned about someone selling US$250k (not M! K!) USDT, because they were afraid that might upset the apple cart, even though USDT is notionally backed by $68B of assets.
> One of the famous SBF screenshots showed Binance's CEO deeply concerned about someone selling US$250k (not M! K!) USDT,
I mean, i've read those chats and that's not at all what CZ is saying. He even clarifies that selling 100x that amount would do nothing to depeg tether.
he just said a particular trader and one specific trade was a pain for his exchange.
And that doesn't in anyway change what I said that if someone was holding tether then they could still mark it at par and be fine with selling the entire amount.
No interest in questioning your/their sources, but $250k is an order of microbusiness’s hourly amount. It can barely even move a spread on any exchange, unless dropped into an order book as is*. I worked few years ago as a trading bot developer for a company of 3-5 people who traded EUR and USD stablecoins for a local currency as part of their ops. $100k amount was a lazy morning.
If an exchange worries about $250k, it’s dead in milliseconds. There must be some huge context missing in that post.
* and even in this case a book will just swallow it at the expense of a market-order side and drift back in under a second.
I still don’t get how this could be interpreted as a “deeply concerned about someone selling $250k”, when the answer is “no I don’t think 100x that size would succeed”. From this I see one guy (C Z) who’s probably concerned about a supposedly systemic action with unclear goals, and another one (blue) fooling around a specific transaction.
I mean they could be deeply concerned as a person about whatever they projected about it, but it’s technically impossible with $250k which they admit right away. The way it was stated in the comment above is editorial, to say the least.
Looking through the chat, it doesn't seem to me that CZ is suspecting SBF with just this $250k trade. To me it looks like he is suspecting that SBF is doing something shady, and the $250k trade is just a tiny example of that activity. You have to intrepret this quite strongly to have the view that CZ seriously would think 250k would move the market. Additionally, CZ was right that SBF is a crook.
Exchanging $250k into USDC, DAI, BTC, or ETH is practically nothing compared to the daily volume, and exchanging one of those to USD in a bank account through an exchange is also not a big deal at all. 250k is a small amount.
What insolvent companies hold tether?
If they did this would be the first thing they would unload as hey can always get park value for their tether.