Cryptocurrency firm Tether will pay $41 million in an agreement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to settle charges that it misled investors when it claimed its stablecoins were 100 percent backed by fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar and the euro.
From at least 2016 to 2019, Tether claimed it had sufficient U.S. dollar reserves to back every Tether stablecoin in circulation when, in fact, “Tether reserves were not ‘fully-backed’ the majority of the time,” the CFTC said Friday in a press release. Tether was instead at times backed by “unsecured receivables and non-fiat assets in its reserves,” the agency said.
