The company behind the stablecoin Tether (USDT), Tether Holdings Inc., claims that revealing the full backing for their tokens could irreparably damage their business model. This comes from a response issued by Tether’s attorneys to a FOIL request from CoinDesk.

Where Is Tether Storing Its Money?

That Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests asks that Tether release to the public its backing for all stablecoins on the network. According to the Tether platform, all of its USDT tokens are supposed to be backed up with a 1:1 relationship by US dollars, but recent data releases from the company have shown that not all of the backing was in fiat currency.

CoinDesk has joined a filing with the New York Attorney General’s office with that FOIL request, which resulted in an $41 million fine for Tether. In addition, Tether’s holding information had to be released, but it has not been made public. That’s what continues to be at stake here, and there will likely be further legal action and outcry for data releases until it does become public.

What we do know is that not all of the Tether tokens are backed by fiat currency. Some of them are backed by bonds and a variety of other financial assets, which has called into question the strength of Tether’s backing. Still, the cryptocurrency has managed to weather these storms for many months and stand tall as the top stablecoin on the market.

Tether’s Concerns

The claim coming out of Tether at the moment is that CoinDesk is requesting this information because of their ownership by the digital currency group. This is a company that has its own stablecoin that competes with Tether, a company invested in by Circle.

Tether contends that the assets behind its holdings are already partially public information. It does publish what percentage of each financial asset its holdings are built from. It maintains that to ask for public details of all those assets is completely unreasonable, specifically because the competition would be aware of what it is doing.

While it may benefit Circle for Tether to publicly reveal these details, it could also benefit Tether by laying to rest a lot of the contentions that have been raised over the last year or so.