Why would bfx_drew make a comment that doesn´t make any sense? He works for Bitfinex after all, therefore
he should be much more knowledgeable about the cryptocurrency scene than the average reddit user.
It looks like a post in response to someone where he just didn't think through what he was saying. He could have gone back and deleted it but then there would just be more screams of conspiracy.
Let me explain what could be a possible course of events using a hypothetical example:
1. An altcoin exchange like Poloniex that has no fiat banking (= no fiat deposits = no inflow of actual fiat) makes a ton of income due to trading fees
2. Let´s assume they make 20M $ in a month from a few trading pairs
3. The fee income is collected as cryptocurrencies, because no fiat has ever entered Poloniex (see 1.)
4. Poloniex doesn´t want to hold the cryptocurrencies and instead transfers the ownership of a basket of
cryptocurrencies worth 20M $ to Tether
5. Tether issues 20M $ of USDT, which are backed by the cryptocurrencies (and not by actual fiat deposits)
...
Step 5 is where this falls down. Exchange rate volatility would make that impossible to maintain and secondly Freedman LLC would not have confirmed that the money was in bank accounts.
As mayax correctly points out thinks it is extremely unlikely / basically impossible that institutional investors have wired that kind of money to Tether.
This would also explain why Tether issues new USDT in spite of closing registrations at Tether.to for months.
It's going to be a mixture of customers. A question for you. You probably saw the Tether rich list nrd525 posted on his thread earlier. Of those exchanges holding large amounts of Tether how many accept USD wires? Obviously Bitfinex and Bittrex I know of but I don't frequent the others.
https://support.bittrex.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001293992-Purchase-USDT-via-Wire-Transferhttps://wallet.tether.to/richlist