Dylan LeClaire, a self-proclaimed market analyst, believes that there may be money laundering involved in the ongoing FTX case. According to LeClaire, Alameda, a cryptocurrency company, created 36 billion USDT (Tether) but only redeemed about 4 billion USDT. This stark difference in the numbers has raised suspicions that Alameda might have acted as a conduit for other undisclosed parties.
In a recent social media post, LeClaire shared a screenshot revealing that Alameda Research had transferred a substantial $36.65 billion to Tether within an unspecified time frame. However, Tether only returned about 4 billion USDT, resulting in an outstanding balance of over 30 billion USDT.
LeClaire also pointed out that the 36 billion USDT figure wouldn’t be as concerning if Alameda was a regular and significant redeemer of USDT. Yet, their history shows that they only redeemed approximately 4 billion USDT, with most of these redemptions occurring during the LUNA/UST market crash. This has led to suspicions that a significant amount of money must have been transferred to Tether to mint such a substantial volume of USDT.
Moreover, LeClaire raised questions about the lack of mention of these funds wired to Tether in the ongoing trial involving SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried), the founder of FTX. He speculates that this omission might be a deliberate effort, especially since a former employee of FTX, Caroline Ellison, mentioned $2 billion of FTX funds used for stablecoin conversions to USDC but didn’t reference the tens of billions of dollars wired to Tether. This leaves room for the possibility that these funds were transferred without Ellison’s knowledge.
Delving further into the matter, LeClaire highlighted that all stablecoins on FTX were valued at $1, except for USDT, which had a trading range between $0.95 and $0.975. This anomaly, according to the market analyst, suggests potential misconduct within the process.
LeClaire’s assessment suggests that the most plausible explanation is that other entities wired funds to Tether, and in return, Tether sent USDT to Alameda’s wallets for some undisclosed purpose.
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