> I, J.L. van der Velde, hereby declare as follows:
> 1. I am the Chief Executive Officer for iFinex Inc. (“iFinex”), BFXNA Inc. (“BFXNA”), BFXWW Inc. (“BFXWW”), and Tether Limited (“Tether”). I have personal knowledge of the facts set forth below, and if called and sworn as a witness, I could and would testify competently thereto.
> 2. iFinex, through its subsidiaries BFXNA and BFXWW, owns and operates a leading global Virtual Currency platform called Bitfinex.
I don't know what else you need for a smoking gun. Tether and Bitfinex are the same thing.
This is false. In fact, every "USD" market on Bitfinex is actually a Tether market. It doesn't matter what the label on the ticker is, because USD cannot be deposited or withdrawn from Bitfinex, only Tether. Given that, Bitfinex is by far the biggest Tether market.
Whether they are holding a lot of USD₮ or not, I don't know. But since they cannot receive USD, by construction their USD holdings are limited.
[1] https://support.bitfinex.com/hc/en-us/articles/213919369-Wha...
Tether certainly has a connection to Finex but they are not its biggest client. Tether is being used by crypto-only exchanges mainly Bittrex and Poloniex to give people the possibility to trade coin/usd.
A possible explanation of Tether growth is simply that: Polo and Bittrex started using them. Is that shady and tries to avoid regulation by placing a crypto sign over a real dollar? Yes.
> If you don't believe Bitfinex's $600 million in liabilities are worth a copper shilling, the only option for getting your value out of Bitfinex is to swap your liability for Bitcoin, which drives up the price of Bitcoin at the margin.
Except that the price of bitcoin in finex has been lower than other exchanges in the last few weeks and only slightly higher now.