500 Million USDT Coins Redeemed and Burnt by Tether

According to Tether, the move will leave 446 million USDT in the treasury for future USDT issuances. After destroying the redeemed tokens, the company expects to burn about 52.8% of its total former supply.

The Omni Blockchain explorer makes the redemption visible, confirming a transaction in block 547155 of 500 million USDT dated today. Following Tether’s statement, the token holders are advised to refer to the USDT’s issuance and redemption process detailed in its white paper.

According to it, the company states that every USDT token issued or redeemed as recorded publicly by the Bitcoin blockchain will follow a withdrawal or deposit of funds from Tether’s bank account.

As per the white paper, for the cryptocurrency side of the accounting process, the transparency of the public and the public BTC (Bitcoin) blockchain will ensure that every transaction can be verified and tracked. The Tether stable coins are also issued via the BTC blockchain through the Omni layer’s protocol.

Omni Explorer also shows that the Tether token reserves have around 466.67 million stable coins, just as revealed by the company’s statement.

For fiat accounting, the white paper notes that Tether will rely on various processes for the provability of the USD reserves as part of the solvency equation. The processes will include professional audits and publishing the company’s bank account balances on the firm’s transparency page.

The crypto community has been challenging for Tether at times. Earlier this year, some have expressed their doubts whether each USDT was backed up with a dollar and suggested an alleged cover-up for the company to hide a fiat reserve deficit with Bitfinex being its accomplice.

Following allegations of the firm dissolving its relationship with one of the third-party auditors earlier in January, their “Proof of Funds” unveiled later in June claimed that the company had enough dollar reserves held in an undisclosed account for the circulation of the token.

Following today’s news, users have expressed various opinions on social media. While some believe the company is manipulating market prices this way,  others suggest that Tether is unable to back the tokens with sufficient reserves.