SBF’s Alameda minted $38B USDT to profit off arbitrage trading: Coinbase director
Blockchain data flagged by Coinbase director Conor Grogan indicates that Alameda Research redeemed over $38 billion for Tether (USDT) tokens in 2021 despite not having the equivalent assets under management.
Onchain data shows that Alameda was responsible for minting $39.55B of USDT, a number that is 47% of Tether's circulating supply today
A previous report by Protoss estimated the number at around $36.7B; I was able to update these figures with additional wallets I found pic.twitter.com/fYBvGAYlFd
According to Grogan, the total value of USDT creation was higher than Alameda’s total assets on its books at the height of the wider cryptocurrency market bull run in 2021.
Grogan also suggests that FTX-ordered USDT redemptions were likely to have been from Alameda’s tokens, totaling 3.9 billion USDT. The majority of this redemption amount was carried out during the collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin.
In January 2021, former Alameda co-CEO Sam Trabucco weighed in on prevailing reports of significant USDT mints carried out by Tether and gave inside insights into how Alameda profited off arbitrage opportunities relating to the value of USDT to various trading pairs across different exchanges.
BTW, to connect some dots here -- a lot of the people seeking access to a coin like USDT *aren't* doing so via creation. They're often doing so via just sorta buying it in the markets -- and they're buying a LOT, and REALLY aggressively. https://t.co/pKRj3AMJ9D
Trabucco described how the premium in which USDT trades to $1 was typically volatile, given that Bitcoin (BTC)-to-USDT trades resulted in a slight deficit in basis points when compared to BTC/USD trades.
Trabucco went on to explain that other United States dollar stablecoins like
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