Tether moved $2 billion worth of USDt to Ethereum from multiple chains on behalf of a third-party exchange.
Stablecoin issuer Tether announced on November 6 that it would perform cross-chain swaps of $2 billion worth of USDt to bring that value to Ethereum.
“In (a) few hours Tether will coordinate with a 3rd party prominent exchange to perform a chain swap, converting part of their $USDt cold wallets from different blockchains to $USDt on ETH,” the firm announced on social media platform X. It also mentioned that this largescale cross-chain transfer event would not affect its supply.
The chains from which the funds were transferred include Tron, the Avalanche C-Chain, NEAR, CELO, and EOS. Tron will witness the biggest chunk transferred away from, measuring at about 1 billion USDt tokens. Six hundred million tokens were transferred from Avalanche, 300 million from NEAR, 75 million from CELO, and 60 million from EOS.
While the large caught some users off-guard, Tether mentioned it was doing this on behalf of a third-party exchange wanting to move its USDt holdings to the Ethereum blockchain. The transfer also marks the biggest ever USDt cross-chain transfer.
Tether Was Claimed to be Under Federal Investigation
However, worries about the issuer behind the largest stablecoin by market cap linger. The Wall Street Journal published a piece about Tether last month, painting it in a bad light. It mentioned that the firm was under federal investigation due to facilitating money laundering for criminal outfits. It also claimed that Tether could be sanctioned as a result of the investigation. However, WSJ did not name any sources.
The stablecoin issuer clapped back, saying the claims made by the news outlet were “outrageous.” It added, “These stories are based on pure rank speculation despite Tether confirming that it has no knowledge of any such investigations into the company.” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino also issued a statement on his X account, mentioning, “As we told to WSJ there is no indication that Tether is under investigation. WSJ is regurgitating old noise. Full stop.”
It seems Tether was in damage control after the publishing of the WSJ article, as Ardoino disclosed the company’s reserves backing the USDt stablecoin in the Plan B conference held at Lugano, Switzerland. He explained that the firm held $100 billion in US Treasury bills, over 82,000 bitcoin worth more than $5.5 billion at the time, and nearly 50 tonnes of gold.
