‘Tether Never Borrowed From Celsius,’ Says Tether CTO Paolo Adroino

• Tether’s CTO has addressed the misinformation in the Celsius examiner’s final report.
• The executive clarified that his firm never borrowed from Celsius.
• The examiner’s report claimed that Celsius’s loans to Tether were twice its credit limit.

The fallout from the sensational report filed by Celsius’ examiner has caught the world’s largest stablecoin in its crosshairs. The independent examiner claimed in her final report that Tether had borrowed money from Celsius and maintained significant exposure to the bankrupt crypto lender.

Earlier today, Paolo Adroino, the CTO of USDT issuer Tether, took to Twitter to address the concerns surrounding his company’s exposure to Celsius. The clarifications came on a report summary tweeted by FT reporter Khadim Shubber.

The Tether executive, who also serves as the Chief Technology Officer to Bitfinex, clarified that “Tether never borrowed from Celsius.” Adroino believes that the examiner either made a typographical error or a mischaracterization while describing Tether’s transactions with Celsius. According to him, the report mixed the prepositions “from” and “to”.

The independent examiner’s report claimed that Tether was one of Celsius’s borrowers. One part of the report stated that Celsius’s loans to Tether were twice its credit limit.

Citing a PowerPoint presentation from April last year, the report noted:

The Tether exposure eventually grew to over $2 billion — a number so large that in late September 2021 that exposure was described to the Risk Committee as ‘present[ing] an existential risk to Celsius’ because Celsius’s capital is insufficient to survive a Tether default.

Tether was an early investor in Celsius. The USDT issuer made an equity investment of $10 million back in 2020. The crypto lender had reportedly borrowed $1 billion from Tether 2021, for an interest rate between 5% and 6%. This loan was almost completely liquidated after Celsius suspended withdrawals in June last year.