Bitfinex: We’re fine. Noble Bank insolvency has no impact on us
If Bitfinex is sweating under recent allegations, that's just because fiat processing is hard work.
Tether, Noble Bank and Bitfinex are like three peas in a pod. So when rumours of a Noble Bank insolvency along with associated rumours around Tether's solvency recently surfaced, all eyes were on Bitfinex to see if it was starting to sweat.
A light workout
Bitfinex has now responded, in the same quippy and dryly sarcastic tone that has somehow become the go-to style of any cryptocurrency exchange hitting back at media reporting.
"Bitfinex is not insolvent, and a constant stream of Medium articles claiming otherwise is not going to change this," it said. "How any rational party can claim insolvency when the opposite is there for all to see is interesting and, once again, perhaps indicative of a targeted campaign based on nothing but fiction."
At the same time, Bitfinex was undeniably sweating, as people were quick to point out, because everywhere you look, there are people waiting weeks or months for their fiat withdrawals from Bitfinex.
Bitfinex also addressed these rumours by noting that fiat withdrawals are frankly really hard work, so it can probably be forgiven for breaking a sweat.
"Complications continue to exist for us in the domain of fiat transactions, as they do for most cryptocurrency-related organisations," it said. "However, we continue to do our utmost to minimise any waiting times associated with fiat deposits and withdrawals."
Noble Bank? Who's that?
"Stories and allegations currently circulating mentioning an entity called Noble Bank have no impact on our operations, survivability, or solvency," Bitfinex pointedly said.
The phrasing suggests Bitfinex has vaguely heard of Noble Bank somewhere before but doesn't really know what it is.
It might be a little disingenuous though, given that Noble Bank has been providing Bitfinex with banking services for some time and might share some senior staff members with both Tether and Bitfinex.
It's probably not worth reading too much into it, but the fact that Bitfinex is distancing itself from Noble Bank might suggest that the rumours of the bank's insolvency hold some water, which might in turn suggest that Tether's problems are also quite real.
Either way, the main point of Bitfinex's dry rebuttal was to refute allegations of its own insolvency rather than talk about Noble Bank.
The world's most independent audit
The great thing about the blockchain is that it theoretically doesn't lie, so you can go ahead and conduct your own independent audit of some of Bitfinex's holdings. It provided its bitcoin, Ether and EOS cold wallet addresses to help out.
In those alone, it's showing about a billion US dollars of bitcoin, a few hundred million of Ether, and a bit over $200 million in EOS – enough to buy it quite a lot of votes.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VET, XLM, BTC and ADA.
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