Tether held near $1 after New York’s Bitfinex order

A stable price under an unstable claim

On April 28, 2019, Tether’s USDT traded at $0.9939 in CoinMarketCap’s historical market snapshot, only three days after the New York attorney general disclosed a court order restricting Bitfinex and Tether. The quoted level was 0.61% below USDT’s intended $1 value, a Coinburn calculation using the snapshot price. That was a visible discount, but not a break of the stablecoin’s operating role.

The same snapshot ranked USDT eighth by market capitalization at $2.829 billion, based on 2.847 billion tokens in circulating supply, and reported $10.549 billion of volume over the preceding 24 hours. Bitcoin alone showed more reported volume, at $12.820 billion. Those figures made the response consequential: the market continued to use USDT heavily even as the legal record raised a direct question about the dollar reserves associated with it.

What New York’s order established

The underlying development was legal, not merely reputational. A New York Supreme Court order signed on April 24, 2019, required iFinex, Bitfinex and the related Tether entities to produce records covering reserve transactions, customer withdrawals, tether issuance and redemption, accounts, and dealings with New York customers. It also preliminarily restrained the respondents from taking further action to access, lend, encumber or otherwise claim Tether’s U.S.-dollar reserves.

On April 25, the attorney general’s office publicly alleged that Bitfinex no longer had access to more than $850 million in commingled customer and corporate funds sent to Crypto Capital Corp. The office further alleged that Bitfinex had obtained access to as much as $900 million of Tether reserves and had already drawn at least $700 million. These were the regulator’s allegations in an ongoing investigation, not final findings of liability on April 28.

The distinction matters. The signed order verifies the restrictions and document demands. The attorney general’s release states the office’s account of the missing funds and related transactions. Neither record by itself proved the size or liquidity of Tether’s remaining reserves, and the April 28 market price did not resolve those questions.

What the market did — and did not — say

CoinMarketCap’s April 28 snapshot showed USDT down 0.12% over 24 hours and 1.30% over seven days. Bitcoin was listed at $5,285.14, down 0.07% over 24 hours, while ether was $157.30, down 0.98%. In that limited cross-section, there was no broad one-day crypto collapse accompanying USDT’s discount.

A contemporaneous Axios analysis published April 28 also observed that Tether’s price had remained close to $1 after the New York disclosure. The stronger interpretation is not that traders cleared Tether of reserve risk. It is that exchange liquidity and common use as a trading pair preserved demand despite a material challenge to the issuer’s reserve narrative.

A market quote cannot demonstrate dollar redemption capacity. It can reflect arbitrage expectations, trading frictions, limited access to direct redemption, or demand for a liquid crypto-denominated substitute for dollars. Reported volume likewise measures trading activity, not unique dollars entering the system, and exchange-reported figures in 2019 carried well-documented quality concerns.

Limits of the April 28 record

CoinMarketCap’s historical page is an aggregate snapshot rather than an official closing auction. Crypto traded continuously across venues; the page does not provide an intraday USDT range, venue-by-venue weights, direct redemption data, or an auditable reserve balance for April 28. Its displayed percentage windows and 24-hour volume are accepted here as the provider’s published measurements, not independently reconstructed trades.

The defensible conclusion is narrow: on April 28, USDT remained just below its target and among the market’s most heavily traded assets while a court-backed New York investigation challenged how its reserves had been used. Whether the peg was durable, and whether every token could be redeemed for a dollar, remained unresolved on that date.