In what could be touted as an accident, the operator of stablecoin Tether minted and subsequently burned 5 billion USDT tokens, as per Whale alert’s tweet on July 13.
Whale Alert is a Twitter account focussed on reporting large cryptocurrency transactions. The account initially noted that 50 million USDT tokens were transferred from cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex to the Tether Treasury via the Omni protocol on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain.
Subsequently it was reported that Tether Treasury minted 5 billion USDT tokens on the Tron blockchain, after which it burned them. Then again Tether minted another 50 million USDT on the same chain, burned another 4.5 billion USDT, and finally transferred 50 million Tron-based USDT tokens to a wallet presumably belonging to Poloniex.
Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino elaborated the reason with a tweet. Tether meant to perform a swap of 50 million Omni-based USDT tokens to the Tron blockchain, however a mistake was made with the decimals. Cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex confirmed in a tweet:
“Paolo is correct – this occurred while Poloniex was conducting a USDT chain swap with the help of Tether. An incorrect amount of USDT was accidentally minted, and this has since been resolved to the intended value.”
The New York-based Metropolitan Commercial Bank reported earlier this week, that it has shut down accounts associated with Tether. The bank reportedly closed the accounts following a request last year.
Read more:Crypto And Blockchain Weekly Wrap Up – 08 July 2019 – 14 July 2019
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