If it’s up to Reeve Collins, the co-founder of Tether, Sam Bankman-Fried should go to jail as soon as possible. “Sam Bankman-Fried was extremely negligent, a dramatic manager or a fraudster. At this level, it doesn’t matter which of the three it was, he needs to go to jail,” Collins told CNBC.
Don’t use stock exchanges as a bank
Collins also had some advice for investors: “Using exchanges as a bank account is risky. Don’t hold your coins on an exchange platform,” said Collins. With this he obviously refers directly to the problems at FTX. In itself, this is a strange statement, given that Tether has a right to exist because of the exchanges.
Without exchanges, Tether would not have been so important. After all, USDT acts as a way for investors to temporarily seek out the relative safety and stability of the US dollar. This is what investors do when they feel that the market will start a decline on the shorter or longer time frames. Although Collins does say that using the exchange is not necessarily dangerous, but saving on an exchange platform is.
Everyone was in shock
Incidentally, these statements by Collins do not mean that he had seen everything coming. Like the rest of the industry, he was shocked by FTX’s sudden collapse. Immediately afterwards he calls out that Sam Bankman-Fried is responsible for the problems. Collins is currently no longer actively involved with Tether. The successful entrepreneur is currently fully focused on NFTs and the Metaverse.
Things are not going well there at the moment, but given the history of Collins, money will not be a problem for the entrepreneur for a while. He has his proverbial sheep on dry land. Of Tether, which he sold in 2015, he says that to this day the company has returned a dollar for every USDT exchanged.