TrueUSD Wobbles Towards $1 Peg Amid Reported Redemption Issues

Stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) continued to wobble off its peg, trading as low as 96 cents early Thursday, before recovering to 99 cents, as some firms claim their redemption requests were denied.

According to trading data from Binance, traders have sold $303.5 million in TUSD against $129 million in buys, making for a negative net flow of $174.5 million.

One large quantitative crypto trading firm that spoke to CoinDesk on background said that its redemption requests have been denied, and complained about the difficulty in redeeming TUSD for fiat after the blow-up of crypto custodian Prime Trust.

Spokespersons for TrueUSD did not respond to a request for comment.

TUSD has been closely linked to Tron founder Justin Sun. As such, data from the on-chain analysis tool Arkham Intelligence showed that one wallet address related to Sun transferred over $60 million in the past five hours to crypto exchange Binance, which preceded TUSD’s climb back to its intended $1 mark.

The wallet then received $50 million in TUSD withdrawals from Binance. CoinDesk has not been able to independently verify if this wallet belongs to Sun.

Binance data shows that there has been an inflow of $1.8 million into TUSD in the last two hours as of late afternoon Hong Kong time.

The inability of stablecoin holders to redeem their stablecoins for dollars is a critical problem for stablecoin issuers and leads to a lack of confidence in the market, resulting in a de-pegging.

During last spring’s crypto banking crisis, Circle’s USDC temporarily de-pegged when Silicon Valley Bank failed, and Signature Bank was shut down by regulators, as Circle held $3.3 billion in USDC’s reserves at SVB and Signature was a key piece of infrastructure for redemptions.

According to data from Glassnode, the circulating supply of TUSD has dropped to $1.9 billion from approximately $2.3 billion at the start of the year.