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Tether Holds More US Treasuries Than Australia

Plus is Bald an Alameda plant?

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
August 01, 2023

The Breakdown First Five - Tuesday, August 1 2023

Welcome back to The Breakdown First Five — the 5 most interesting and/or important stories in bitcoin, crypto, and markets to start your day.

Australia in the style of a flat 8-bit computer graphic from a 1990s video

5. Bald-faced actions

Base memecoin Bald rugged on Monday, but is there more to the story? On chain sleuths have dug up a pile of evidence pointing to the Bald rugger having ties to Alameda Research. Some pointed out commonalities in the way Bald accounts wrote to many well known Sam-erisms, indicating that SBF might have been behind the rugpull. Others thought it was more likely to be Sam Trabucco, last seen sailing off into the distance and escaping the FTX fallout.

4. Terraform Judge Rejects Ripple

A Federal Judge has denied Terraform’s motion to dismiss the SEC’s lawsuit and expressly rejected the decision in the Ripple case. The Judge said Ripple was decided incorrectly and did not apply the Howey test properly. The decision has no impact on the outcome in the Ripple case itself, but raises questions around how persuasive it will be as precedent moving forward.

3. Mid-Curve

With the Curve carnage out of the way, the cleanup remains. Curve founder Michael Egorov had over $150M of Curve’s rapidly depreciating token pledged across multiple DeFi lending protocols. The major issue was a Frax loan for around $17M which is accruing interest exponentially faster. Early this morning Egorov cleared the Frax loan after selling a massive clip of CRV tokens to Justin Sun. Justin Sun appears to have won the Curve wars.

2. SEC: “Delist Everything”

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has claimed the SEC told the exchange to delist everything but Bitcoin in pre-lawsuit discussions. Faced with a decision between destroying the US Crypto industry and going to Court to fight the regulator, Armstrong said he had little choice. The SEC have denied giving this formal instruction, which begs the question of what the SEC’s tactics look like behind closed doors.

1. Tether Bigger than Australia

Tether’s quarterly reserve attestation showed that it holds $72.5B in US government debt exposure. That puts it above Australia but behind Germany in terms of large holders of Treasuries. The firm also says it notched up over $1B in operating profits for the quarter, putting it in the same ballpark as Blackrock in terms of profitability. Is Tether now a systemically important global institution?

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Thanks for reading -NLW