Hint: Its not USD. For an exchange like Binance, its USDT, or Tethers. Its not so hard for them to print USDT and pretend that they're dollars.
Rising interest rates certainly helped them and USDC/USDT are a money making machine now for their owners.
Do you have a link for this? All I could find is an "attestation" of reserves from a few months ago but could not find any evidence of an audit by a third party that might constitute "proof".
Latest report from an independent auditor: https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/63oJePOHqIvrcnXWMP...
Key stats: "Cash & Cash Equivalent & Other Short-Term Deposits" are $73,567,577,334 (out of total assets of $86,499,251,218). Remaining assets are precious metals ($3,270,216,824), bitcoin ($1,676,229,360), corporate bonds ($115,496,758) etc.
It is no rocket science to see why USDT is in black now - with 83B USDT, they have that much cash available to park in T-bills and earn 5+% interest just like that. Even if they were in a hole a few years back, they would have recovered over the last 12-18 months when interest rates started rising.
Wrong; you need people buying the roughly $25M worth of daily new bitcoins just to maintain the current price.