The issue with Tether's auditing situation is no new news, but it's still on people's minds as to what is going to become of tether.
Tether is a cryptocurrency backed by the US dollar, where every Tether dollar is worth basically the price of 1 US dollar. There is nothing wrong with that. This simply allows us less susceptible to volatility and a great plus for exchange arbitrage. Although they are not the only ones in this space it does puts more eyeballs on them seeing that they are on major exchanges like Bittrex & Binance.
One spokesman from Tether is reported to have said:
"We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success."
Now, as it turns out Tether ended up not following through with the audit even though they said they're the first in this space to do an audit (see BitLicense & QuadrigaCX). They chose rather to complain about the auditing process being too complicated, but in the spirit of transparency you would think they would take all the necessary steps to comply and go through with it. Right? No. And just to clarify cash is one of the most quickest statement audits to complete, especially since Tether only has EURO and USD bank accounts.
When it comes to the subpoena the burden of proof lies with Tether to prove that they have over $2B US and counting.
The audit firm that they hired, Friedman LLP, in essence had to provide an incomplete audit (available here: https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-Tether-Consulting-Report-9-15-17_Redacted.pdf)
At the end of the day it doesn't look good, and it seems like the majority are not even paying attention.
If it turns out that Tether indeed has a balanced sheet, fine great, we can all return to our lives of extreme wealth, lambos and penthouse suites. And if in fact they are not, then it's one less bad actor that we have to worry about in this cryptospace which seems to be rife with ponzi schemes(see Bitconnect), scam coins, and hacks.
What do you think about the Tether situation, do you think they'll stick around, do you think they need an audit to prove what they're promising? Post in the comments your thoughts on this subject.
