Tether’s new friend. November 2, 2018.

For weeks now, de-pegged stablecoin Tether has been (reportedly) seeking a new bank to house its $1.8 billion reserves. On Thursday, Tether confirmed that it had done just that. Tether’s reserves will now live in Deltec Bank and Trust Limited, a Bahamian bank founded in 1959.

To assuage fears that it’s, well, lying, Tether dredged up a letter, signed by an obscure squiggle purporting to represent Deltec’s management (there’s no actual name attached), that supposedly demonstrates proof of the $1,821,322,828 in Deltec’s reserves.

However, Deltec, in its letter, insists that it has taken on Tether "without any liability” on the part of the bank, its shareholders, directors, employees or officers. Hardly a vote of confidence, then.

Tether, for its part, asserts that Deltec conducted a full and thorough background check, particularly on its not-so-feted ability to “maintain the USD-peg at any moment and our treasury management policies.”

How one does a “background check” on a hypothetical, continuously disproven proposition is anyone’s guess.

EOS is not a blockchain, says rival

ConsenSys, a venture capital studio that funds projects on the Ethereum network (yes, and us, well done you), has released a scathing report—conducted by blockchain research firm Whiteblock—on how EOS, Ethereum’s main competitor, is “not a blockchain, but rather a “distributed homogeneous database management system.” Pow.

Whiteblock, in its conclusion, asserts that “EOS block producers are highly centralized,” and that users can “only access the network using block producers [the 21 delegates who verify EOS’s network] as intermediaries.” These block producers, the report asserts, are susceptible to phishing attacks, hacks, and extortion and are “a single point of failure for the entire system.”

Moreover, Whiteblock chafes with EOS’s use of a “Chainbase” database, instead of a standard digital ledger, which Whiteblock claims doesn’t use cryptography, a must for any aspiring blockchain.

All of this, of course, has to be taken in context. ConsenSys, obviously, has a bone to pick with EOS, which has been seducing its DApp developers for some time now. Questions have also been raised about how Whiteblock carried out its research. An EOS developer told Hard Fork that Whiteblock’s characterisation of EOS as “not a blockchain” was “weird,” and that the research firm ignored the various cryptographic procedures that it uses.

Blockchain or not, Ethereum, it’s still stealing your user base.

In related news, ConsenSys is now, genuinely, funding Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company that has already launched several satellites. We still love you, ConsenSys. (Largely because you pay us.)

Is Vitalik jumping ship?

In a word, no. You might have thought otherwise, however, had you read the headline of an MIT Technology Review item on Thursday claiming that Mr. Buterin, king of Ethereum, said “his creation can’t succeed unless he takes a step back.”

“I am not leaving,” Buterin corrected on Twitter. What he had said was that Ethereum should be able to survive without him, which makes sense.

“So are you saying the headline and sub-headline are inaccurate?” asked one shrewd commenter.

“Umm.... this is [the mainstream media] we're talking about. So, yes,” responded Buterin.

The article’s subheading, at least, got some kudos.

Always nuanced with Mr. Buterin. Lovely. (Genuinely.)

In other news:

• Azerbaijan to field test smart contracts for public infrastructure
• Morgan Stanley says cryptocurrencies are “insitiutional asset class”
• IOTA tokens supported on ledger

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