Emerging Prime Trust ties have traders fretting over TUSD

With short interest mounting, traders say they’re parsing liquidity, as well as pricing, on the stablecoin True USD.

The issuers of True USD (TUSD) had previously claimed that it had “no exposure” to digital asset on- and off- ramp company Prime Trust that had been recently shut down by Nevada regulators.

But most recent attestation reports as reviewed by Blockworks, said that it has a $26,000 exposure to the company — which regulators have moved to place under receivership. That exposure, though, is a pittance of TUSD’s $3 billion circulating supply.

Minting and redemption mechanisms around TUSD tokens have become muddled, with some users saying they’ve had trouble on both fronts.

Carlos Gonzalez, a research analyst at 21.co, told Blockworks on Thursday that it “didn’t make a lot of sense” for TUSD’s apparent liquidity issues to be attributed to its $26,000 of Prime Trust exposure alone.

“It’s insignificant,” Gonzalez said. “It’s basically nothing [compared to its $3 billion circulating supply]. If it had just been $26,000, it didn’t make a lot of sense for the stablecoin to pause minting and redemptions — but apparently Prime Trust was the clearing bank [of TUSD], and that’s why that happened.”