A risk assessment by a DeFi security dude. Note: I worked as a security auditor and engineer in the blockchain space for three years and participated in audits and formal verification of DeFi protocols such as Aave, Bancor and mStable which also involved assessing economic risk. Consider this a free Tether risk assessment that Tether didn’t ask for.

This article reflects my personal opinion and I’ve been known to be wrong at times. Let me know in the comments if you spot any glaring errors.

Tether’s USDT stable coin has experienced massive growth since the start of the ongoing bull cycle. There’s now an order of magnitude more USDT in circulation than during the height of the 2017–2018 cycle. This makes it worth re-investigating whether the crypto markets are robust against a potential Tether-related liquidity shock.

In this article I attempt to address the following questions:

• How would a loss of confidence in Tether play out in the short term?
• Who would get most rekt if a Tether-related crash happens?
• Would a Tether confidence crisis be a black swan event* that would severely impact the market?

* For the purpose of this article, we use “black swan” to refer to a massive event that would surprise most people. After all, 95% of people in the crypto space insist that Tether is fine. If you’re unhappy with that definition feel free to think of it as a white swan event.

“What may be a black swan surprise for a turkey is not a black swan surprise to its butcher.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In 2018, Hasu found that USDT made up for 29% of Bitcoin’s liquidity. Since then, the situation has become a lot more complicated. Not only is there 12x as much Tether in circulation. USDT base pairs also dominate spot markets on centralized exchanges (CEX) where they account for roughly 65% of trading volume. Furthermore, the complexity of the market has increased significantly due to the proliferation of crypto-related TradFi products, DeFi protocols and USDT-collateralized derivatives. That said, this analysis focuses on CEX and DeFi markets which would get directly impacted by a Tether shock.

The stable coin landscape

As of June 17th, 2021, USD stable coins have an aggregate market cap of $106.2 billion and USDT has a 61% share of that pie.

Now, where’s all that USDT located? CryptoQuant tracks $7.25B USDT in exchange USDT reserves. However, this doesn’t count USDT on the Tron blockchain which accounts for half of the USDT supply. According to Tether’s rich list, 17 billion Tron USDT are held by Binance alone. The list also shows 12.8B USDT in Huobi’s exchange wallets. That’s almost 30B USDT held by only two exchanges. Considering those numbers, the value given by CryptoQuant appears severely understated. A more realistic estimate is that ~75% of the Tether supply (47B USDT) is located on centralized exchanges.

Interestingly, only a small fraction of those USDT shows up in spot order books. One likely reason is that a large share is sitting on wallets to collateralize derivative positions, in particular perpetual futures. The CEX futures market is essentially a casino where traders bet on crypto prices with insane amounts of leverage. And it’s a massive market: Futures trading on Binance alone generated $60 billion in volume over the last 24 hours. It’s important to understand that USDT perpetual futures implementations are 100% USDT-based, including collateralization, funding and settlement. Prices are tied to crypto asset prices via clever incentives, but in reality, USDT is the only asset that ever changes hands between traders. This use-case generates significant demand for USDT .

With regards to DeFi, 2.19% of the USDT supply is locked in smart contracts according to Glassnode. Again, the real number is likely higher since Glassnode can’t possibly track all DeFi protocols across all blockchains. We’ll assume a value of ~5% which seems to be compatible with the numbers shown by major Ethereum DeFi protocols: Cumulative USDT liquidity on Aave, Compound and Uniswap is $1.73B.

The rest of the pack

The market perceives USDT differently from other, “safer” stable coins. This distinction is sometimes made explicit on exchanges. For example, FTX considers USD, USDC and BUSD to be equivalent while USDT is treated as a separate asset.

With that in mind, let’s look at the distribution of USDC and BUSD, the second and third largest stable coins. According to CryptoQuant there’s a total of 1.59B USDC and 5.02B BUSD in exchange reserves, or 6.7% and 52% of the supply, respectively (as with USDT, the real numbers are probably somewhat higher than reported by CryptoQuant, although USDC and BUSD are issued on fewer blockchains and should be easier to track).

Besides the fact that the share of USDC sitting on centralized exchanges is relatively small, I found it notable that liquidity in USDC/USDT and BUSD/USDT order books on offshore exchanges is generally thin on the sell side, i.e. there’s not a lot of liquidity available to USDT holders who want to “cash out” into safer stable coins.

Let’s look at DeFi stats. Glassnode reports that 17.22% of the USDC supply is locked up in smart contracts. Again, Glassnode only considers data from the Ethereum blockchain, but USDC is used on other DeFi chains too, including a pegged version of USDC on Binance Smart Chain with 1.8B supply. USDC liquidity on Aave, Compound and Uniswap adds up to 8.14B, or 4.7x higher than USDT. Given those numbers, it seems reasonable to assume that at least 25% of USDC is “locked” in DeFi smart contracts.

At 0.55%, the percentage of BUSD locked in smart contracts looks much lower but again data from Binance Smart Chain is missing here. There’s 768m BUSD locked in PancakeSwap and 2.26B available for borrowing on cream.finance, showing that BUSD is heavily used on Binance Smart Chain. 30% of BUSD supply in smart contracts sounds like a reasonable estimate.

Fiat liquidity

Ties between the cryptocurrency markets and the “legacy” fiat world have always been shaky. Just recently, Binance lost its USD banking partner. Consequently, fiat trading is only available on a subset of exchanges.

Looking into USDT/USD, BTC/USD and ETH/USD order books on Bitfinex, Coinbase, Binance US, Kraken, FTX, and Gemini, which represent 60% of fiat exchange market share, I found a total of $203m in bids within -2% depth. Note that I didn’t account for EUR and KRW, plus there might be buyers looking to pick up cryptocurrencies at a discount in the event of a USDT crash. Total fiat liquidity bidding on crypto on fiat exchanges is likely closer to $1B or somewhere in the low ten digits.

How much fiat liquidity is there in the market overall? It’s hard to tell. It may well be that institutions are queueing up at OTC desks with billions of US dollars, ready to buy the dip (though recent outflows from digital asset funds suggest otherwise). The waters are further muddied by the fact that institutional investors can get exposure to crypto via instruments on regulated markets such as Grayscale Trust Shares, MicroStrategy stock, Crypto ETFs, and CME Futures. The Coinshares Weekly Digital Asset Fund Flow report provides some insight into those markets. But I think it’s safe to say that “real” fiat liquidity plays a relatively small role in the cryptocurrency spot markets which is where most of the action during a major USDT sell-off would take place.

Analysis

Even if the above estimates are not super precise there are some salient differences between stable coin distributions. Firstly, a larger share of the USDT supply is located on centralized exchanges. It is by far the most liquid stable coin in the CEX world, and as such, it is essential to cross-exchange market makers. USDT also serves as a “casino chip” that grants entry into the perpetual futures market. On the other hand, USDT is largely shunned by DeFi protocols and gets less usage in that area.

Conversely, USDC serves as the stand-in for USD in DeFi and as a safe haven asset, with a large chunk of the supply locked in smart contracts and sitting in blockchain wallets (this certainly matches my own personal trading experience: Intuitively, the safest way to store value in crypto is holding USDC on a Ledger).

BUSD is a mix of both. Binance — the largest cryptocurrency exchange — offers a BUSD-collateralized version of perpetual futures and many BUSD base pairs so a good chunk of the BUSD supply is being used on Binance. On the other hand, BUSD is also popular on Binance Smart Chain and has a better reputation than USDT, so it also gets some usage as an SOV and “DeFi dollar”.

As we have seen, if USDT holders on centralized exchanges chose to run for the exits, USD/USDC/BUSD liquidity immediately available to them would be relatively small. ~47 billion USDT held on exchanges would be matched with “exit liquidity” of perhaps ~10 billion in fiat currency and USDC/BUSD (not accounting for the fact that liquidity providers would flee the market during a panic — more on this later).

The main reason why USDT price can collapse is that the majority of USDT holders can’t directly “run to the bank”. According to itself, Tether only does business with “professional investors”. If an event occurs that widely damages confidence into Tether — like a crackdown by authorities, a bombshell revelation from ongoing regulations or a random flash crash in the price of USDT — retail traders can only sell their USDT in the CEX spot markets and DeFi markets, either for other crypto assets, stable coins, or fiat. As the March 2020 “COVID crash” has shown, traders will mostly buy stable coins and fiat in times of uncertainty. And we already know there’s not a lot of liquidity available for doing so.

Why Tether’s peg is fragile

To fully understand why the price of USDT might collapse under high sell pressure, let’s first look at how the peg is normally maintained. Demand for USDT is driven by its usefulness in the CEX world. In times of high demand, the USDT peg breaks upwards which creates an arbitrage opportunity where traders can purchase freshly minted USDT from Tether at $1 and buy crypto or USD at a discount.

When the peg breaks downwards, this also creates an arbitrage opportunity where traders can purchase USDT at a cheaper price, thus helping restore the peg (detailed analysis by Frances Coppola).

Under normal circumstances, even if USDT price fell below $1 for a prolonged period, arbitrageurs should eventually buy the discounted USDT and restore the peg. Crucially, this requires trust in Tether: The arbitrageur must have confidence that the USDT can eventually be redeemed at par, or at least above the purchase price. The problem is that this isn’t guaranteed according to Tether’s TOS and Tether isn’t exactly known for its competent, fiscally responsible management style. Thus, it’s riskier for arbitrageurs to help maintain the peg in times of strong sell pressure.

Note that a USDT price crash can occur whether or not Tether is actually solvent. In the short run, it only matters what the market believes.

We have seen that there’s plenty of real fiat money and stable coins in the system. So after all, even if USDT crashes overnight, how bad can it be? Won’t USDT just be flushed out and all that value move into other assets like Bitcoin? Well, let’s think this through.

The idea that value would “move from USDT into other assets” if Tether suddenly becomes worthless is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work, as well as the important role that fiat liquidity plays in its operations.

When liquidity evaporates

Imagine what would immediately happen if half of all US dollars in the real world would be declared fake. As Bitcoiners remind us at least 1,000 times per day, price is a function of scarcity. If US dollars suddenly become twice as scarce they’d also be twice as valuable. In other words, people who own dollars could buy everything twice as cheaply (the wonders of deflation!).

Now, let’s imagine an idealized toy version of the cryptocurrency market. Only two assets trade in this market: Crypto tokens and USD tokens. In this model, all crypto tokens are interchangeable as their USD prices correlate heavily (this is pretty close to what happens in the real markets). DeFi bros may instead imagine a constant product AMM with all crypto tokens (BTC, ETH,…) in reserve 1 & all USD-like tokens in reserve 2.

Let’s plug some numbers from the first section of this article into our toy market. We start out with a balanced market. Now, all of a sudden, 57.8% of the USD token supply (equaling Tether’s share of total fiat liquidity in the crypto markets) are found to be worthless. Since “real” USD tokens are now 57.8% more scarce they should instantly trade at a 136% premium. But that’s just the start! Holders of the now-worthless fake USD tokens would try to dump those tokens into the market, including for “real” USD tokens, further driving up the premium on those tokens. In other words, crypto tokens would become cheaper and cheaper in USD token terms.

That’s not all though. USD liquidity providers and market makers would flee the crypto markets— after all, nobody wants to be dumped on by fake USD token holders. We would be looking at a situation where real USD tokens simply become unavailable. But USD tokens are required to guarantee the basic functions of the market: Market making, arbitrage, loan repayments, and so on. Without them, the market simply freezes.

Of course, the real market is vastly more complex than that and will not behave exactly as described. But the bottom line is: If all USDT were found to be worthless tomorrow, the fiat prices of all crypto assets would dump and the market would experience a liquidity shock as most USD liquidity vanishes.

If the markets do collapse due to a loss of confidence in Tether, what happens next? Well, it depends on how much Tether’s reserves will be worth when everything is said and done. After all, if Tether can actually cough up $62.7B in cash in the aftermath of the crash, it would turn out that the panic was unjustified. Confidence in Tether could be restored and the markets would eventually recover.

This begs the question: How much would Tether’s reserves be worth if a severe downturn happens? To answer this, it would be important to know how exactly 62.7 billion USDT came into existence in the first place.

It is usually implied that USD inflow into Tether’s bank accounts matches the supply of USDT 1:1. But if you look at Tether’s reserves breakdown, specifically the large position in “commercial paper”, you can easily see that Tether could be engaged in fractional reserve banking. “Fractional reserve” in this context would mean that Tether has received only a fraction of 62.7B USD in client deposits. Some fraction of the USDT supply would have been generated by issuing USDT loans with no corresponding inflows. Essentially, Tether would be leveraging its clients’ deposits, which is exactly how commercial banks create fiat money in TradFi.

The issuance process might work as follows. Imagine a fantasy company named “Paolo Co.” which is a subsidiary of, say, “Delta Bank”, co-owned by Tether executives (just like Tether and Bitfinex turned out to have the same owners). Tether purchases commercial paper from Paolo Co. using newly minted USDT. Paolo Co. then invests the borrowed USDT in the crypto markets. The commercial paper goes into Tether’s reserves. This would result in all USDT being “100% backed by reserves”, plus it would make Tether’s reserve basket look like a money market fund which would most minds in the crypto world at rest.

This might be conjecture, but it does not make any sense to ignore a potential black swan risk just because we don’t have all the details on Tether’s operations. The market should demand evidence of proper backing from Tether and assume the worst when that evidence is not provided. Not the other way round!

I don’t doubt that some investors have minted and redeemed USDT for USD (there’s anecdotal evidence that they have), but given Tether’s history of banking problems and legal issues, I find it hard to believe that institutional investors have literally transferred 62.7B US dollars to Tether. To me, the fractional reserve explanation appears more realistic.

Keep in mind that just like TradFi, the crypto markets are a game where everybody’s goal is to maximize profits. Tether operates in an opaque corner of an unregulated market where people tend to believe anything it says, so it has a lot of leeway for bending the rules. And Tether has repeatedly been caught lying. In the words of the New York Attorney General:

If you still have any doubt that Tether is capable of some creative accounting watch Coffeezilla’s excellent video.

The question remains, why would Tether and exchanges potentially put the whole market at risk?

Moral hazard is a well-known cause of financial crises in the TradFi markets: Banks always profit during bull runs but are bailed out by taxpayers when the markets crash, so they have little incentive to act responsibly. Presumably, this is even worse in unregulated markets due to the lack of oversight and accountability.

Part of the problem is that the fat-tail risk is largely being transferred to USDT holders. Neither Tether nor centralized exchanges are liable for redeeming USDT at par. Therefore, if a USDT de-peg does occur, hodlers of USDT and cryptocurrencies would be first to take a haircut as their assets get devalued. Of course, knock-on effects could send exchanges into bankruptcy as well, but at least they’d be in a much better place than hodlers. There have been multiple occasions where holders shared the losses while exchanges continued operations.

In my opinion, a Tether confidence crisis would likely result in a black swan event and a re-shuffling of the market. While there’s a chance that large players would counteract the crisis by buying back large amounts of USDT to restore the peg, or by successfully reassuring the market that all USDT can be redeemed at par, there’s no way to be sure that this will happen, unless you put a whole lot of trust in Tether and its affiliates.

Tether’s (presumed) fractional reserve issuance creates hidden leverage at the “base layer” of the crypto markets. In my opinion, the systemic risk caused by this is not acceptable. The fact that most actors in the market simply don’t acknowledge the risk, and at times go out of their way to defend Tether instead of holding it properly accountable, speaks to the immaturity of the market and its inability to self-regulate.

Whatever you think of the crypto space fundamentally, cryptocurrency assets can’t become viable long-term investments as long as Tether remains systemically important. Getting rid of USDT — black swan or not — will result in a more mature and robust market in the long run.

One can be long-term bullish on the value proposition of decentralized finance and still view the market as a casino. It’s not incompatible.

I’d like to thank Frances Coppola, Gerhard Wagner, and some other contributors who wish to remain anonymous.

The data used in this article was gathered from the following websites between June 14th and June 17th, 2021:

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://muellerberndt.medium.com/is-tether-a-black-swan-51095720b01c?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency