Tether counted 84 “revealing” articles about itself published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) during the year. The issuer of the largest stablecoin by capitalization, USDT, has published material complaining that “it continues to be the object of outdated, inaccurate and misleading coverage and accusations” by a major publication.
The company calculated that the year before last — from January 1, 2021 to January 1, 2022 — the WSJ published 84 articles about Tether or mentions of it. The vast majority of them were negative. During the same period, the WSJ published 28 articles about FTX or mentioning it, and almost all of them are positive.
The authors noted that large companies from the cryptocurrency industry, such as FTX, Celsius and Genesis, which were “supported in the materials of the publication,” later found themselves in the center of financial scandals or went bankrupt.
In early February, the WSJ published a publication about Tether, which claims that the founders and owners of the USDT issuer are an “unusual company” with “limited experience” in the financial sector.
This article stated that Tether discloses little information about its business and management, and “management weaknesses” led in 2021 to fines totaling $61 million to settle investigations by US regulators. At the same time, the publication drew attention to the fact that secrecy, lack of experience and weak regulation have become a risk for investors in other crypto companies.
One of the latest WSJ materials about Tether was an article dated March 3, which claims that the company allegedly provided fake documents to banking partners at various times. Tether has published an official denial, urging not to respond to “rumors and misinformation.”
Just like Tether, the Binance exchange is subject to “revealing” investigations by the leading media. At the end of February, Forbes stated that Binance used customer funds in the same way as the FTX exchange before bankruptcy. Later, the head of Binance said that journalists “deliberately distort the facts,” and the exchange published a detailed explanation about the processes of moving funds between their wallets.