15 Jul 2019 Jane Whitmoore
Tether Employee “Created” $5 Billion Worth Of USDT Out Of Thin Air
Tether, one of the pioneers in the stablecoin realm of cryptocurrencies, has announced that human error caused the creation of $5 billion worth of unpegged USDT tokens. The error occurred while Tether was helping Poloneix transfer $50 million. By placing decimal signs in the wrong place, the employee actually created over five billion USDT tokens out of thin air.
Tether quickly mitigated the risks of releasing those tokens into the wild – the team burnt ten percent (around $500 million worth of tokens) to verify the solution. After the initial confirmation, Tether destroyed the remaining $4,5 billion worth of USDT tokens. This way, the company prevented the creation of ghost funds and unpegged tokens, which would require further USD-backing.
Paolo Ardonio, Tether’s CTO (who is also CTO of crypto exchange Bitfinex) reported that the primary reason behind the human error is that the team must deal with various instruments, some of them – specific for a given blockchain.
“We are working around the clock to make sure such errors would not happen again.”, Ardonio stated.
The error, which could’ve created a ripple effect on the entire crypto sector, comes shortly after the scandal of Tether covering Bitfinex loses of around $850 million, which is yet to be proven by the New York law officials.
Despite the problems, Tether’s price movements over the past week managed to get back in the top spots, after surpassing EOS and Binance Coin (BNB) for a short while and reaching as far as #6 in terms of market capitalization.
As of press time, Tether’s USDT is at #7, and it is trading at $1.00, with highs of $1.01. The recent price dump, which affected the entire crypto sector, actually became beneficial for Tether, as investors are looking at USDT as a haven for their funds if prices clash down, and also as a gateway for buying cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrency Tether Bitfinex cryptocurrency news Stablecoin
