The company behind stablecoin Tether has rebuffed a report by The Wall Street Journal claiming it had ties to entities that faked documents and used shell companies to maintain access to the banking system. On March 3, the WSJ reported on leaked documents and emails purportedly revealing that entities tied to Tether and its sister cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex faked sales invoices and transactions and hid behind third parties in order to open bank accounts they otherwise may not have been able to open. In a March 3 statement, Tether called the findings of the report “stale allegations from long ago” and “wholly inaccurate and misleading. (Cointelegraph)

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Binance USD (BUSD) balance held on exchanges fell below 9 billion tokens as Tether (USDT) becomes dominant amongst stablecoins by accounting for 55%  of the stablecoin market cap.

Tether states the Wall Street Journal’s report about stale allegations from long ago is wholly inaccurate and misleading.

On March 3, the Wall Street Journal claimed that “Tether Holdings and [a] related crypto broker obscured identities” as evidenced by documents it has obtained.

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Since the earliest days of the cryptocurrency industry, Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization, USDT, has been shrouded with controversies and numerous accusations. What comes as the latest blow to the growing stablecoin maker, a report by WSJ states that the company leveraged falsified documents and shell companies to gain banking access at a time when they were facing difficulty to access the global banking system.

The largest whales on the Ethereum ($ETH) network, meaning the largest addresses by cryptocurrency holdings that do not belong to cryptocurrency trading platforms, have been quietly accumulating Ether this year, to the point their holdings hit more than 25 million tokens.

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The chief technology officer of Tether has said his company has no exposure to Silvergate, as companies across the crypto industry line up to distance themselves from the troubled bank.

Tether Gold (XAUT) and Euro Tether (EURT) are now available to users on the Bitget exchange.

According to a press release published by cryptocurrency exchange OKX on Feb. 28, the firm said that it seized 2,014,381 Tether (USDT) from five accounts suspected of partaking in "malicious market manipulation," of the Celestial (CELT) token. As told by OKX, on Feb. 26, Celestial developers announced the creation of a new blockchain game. Shortly afterwards, the Celestial developers allegedly launched a social media campaign promoting the new game using OKX's branding, which the firm says was unauthorized. As a partial result of the activities, the CELT token nearly doubled in value within two days' time before falling over 50% in the past 24 hours to $0.002129 at the time of publication. 

Around $775,000 of stablecoin USDT was allegedly stolen in a phishing scheme on the Tron network, according to an investigation by risk assessment firm Global Ledger. Global Ledger claims the funds were laundered via the TRX staking mechanism. Staking on Tron involves delegating TRX tokens to one of 27 Super Representatives, the network’s version of a validator node. Global Ledger said the fraudsters used the SunSwap exchange to get USDT for Tron in a certain wallet. They then used TRX for staking to verify their transactions and cover transaction fees, Global Ledger said. (Blockworks)

It was on February 24, 2022, that Russia launched the military offensive on Ukraine. On the completion of one year of the war, Chainalysis came up with a report tracking crypto donations to both Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine has received over $70 million in the form of cryptocurrencies since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, providing the nation with military equipment and humanitarian assistance.

The Wall Street Journal published an article on February 10, according to which a large Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, will manage the reserves of Tether invested in US T-bills.

The Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange OKX just published its fourth monthly Proof of Reserves (PoR), which lines up with its earlier PoRs and allows customers to confirm that the exchange actually holds the claimed amount of cryptocurrency. It disclosed maintaining clean assets totaling $8.6 billion in Tether (USDT), Ethereum (ETH), and Bitcoin (BTC).

Six days ago, a few hours before the blockchain infrastructure platform Paxos announced it would no longer mint BUSD stablecoins, $2.86 billion worth of BUSD were redeemed. Currently, Binance is the most active exchange trading BUSD tokens, and the stablecoin still commands roughly 10.7% of the crypto economy’s $67.71 billion in global trade volume over the past 24 hours.

Tether will continue to fight for financial freedom and support projects and organizations which advance global freedom and financial inclusion in the emerging markets.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wants to sue Paxos for issuing and listing stablecoin Binance USD (BUSD) to the benefit of its top-rival stablecoin Tether (USDT), whose market capitalization has risen to multi-month highs.