Did Tether secretly manipulate the price of Bitcoin? The truth is wilder than you think.

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]However, the 2019 [music] paper suggested that there had been unbacked creation of Tether coins, which were then swapped for Bitcoin to artificially drive up [music] demand. This paper became a huge deal in the cryptocurrency space, launching an investigation by the US Justice Department into Tether Limited and Bitfinex, the two companies behind the actual coin.

[00:00:20]>> And there is this phenomena of Tether, and every other day there's a billion dollar of it issued that goes to buying Bitcoin. [music] The investigation found that the virtual currency Tether was not at all times backed by the US dollar as previously believed, which resulted in an 18.5 million dollar fine.