The article wrongly conflates Noble Group - an unrelated Hong Kong company, trading commodities, with Noble Bank - the actual Tether bank, having rumored problems.
The Hong Kong financial group - the one that is being bought by Deutsche Bank - has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. (That means liquidity problems of the Tether bank cannot be related to commodity trading.)
Yes. It's this Noble Bank.[1] "Noble Bank International is a full-reserve bank providing real-time post-trade services to OTC markets including FX and Digital Currencies."[1][2]
Have Tether ever even provided evidence they have dollar backing like they claim? I remember they hadn't in the pump last December and I stopped paying attention after that inevitable pop, so maybe they did at some point. Otherwise though, it seems pretty irrelevant whether the bank that doesn't have the money they claim it does has other unrelated money.
No. They said that they would provide it to a journalist, but only under an all-encompassing NDA, that would forbid any mention of the institution(s) or any balance(s), or any identifying details.
This article is horrible and is just click-bait or trying to induce panic. The $5m volume on Kraken is peanuts to the size of tethers ($2800m). Not only that but looking at the chart, it only moved the price by 0.5% and the volume was not irregular.
The implied price of tether by comparing the price of BTCUSDT vs BTCUSD (and, for that matter, all XXXUSDT and XXXUSD pairs) is consistent with the price indicated on Kraken. That exchange, as far as I'm aware, is the only USDUSDT exchange operating currently.
At 2018-10-15T13:33:24Z:
Kraken USDTZUSD: 0.9248
Gemini BTCUSD: 6384.0
Bitfinex BTCUSDT: 6925.1
G / bfx USDTUSD: 0.9218
Technically, Bitfinex operates a USDUSDT exchange (at 1:1), but they are reporting banking problems [1], and its possible that liquidity flight is driving some of the differential. Their exchange is de facto BTCUSDT since Tether is the fastest path to USD liquidity available, especially at the moment.
You have to understand the asset being traded and the environment. Kraken fees are around 0.1-0.2%. So the Market maker is making 0.4-0.6% if there is demand on USDT after this "dip". That's relatively little profit given the low volume.
So the market maker must be pretty certain that USDT is fine. Otherwise he'll demand a premium to offset the risk of holding USDT.
If anything the argument the OP gave suggests that traders have full faith in USDT.
The Hong Kong financial group - the one that is being bought by Deutsche Bank - has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. (That means liquidity problems of the Tether bank cannot be related to commodity trading.)