TrueUSD continues to depeg, hits low point of $0.97

Stablecoin TrueUSD ( TUSD -0.12% ) dropped to a point of around $0.9708 on Thursday morning in Asia. TUSD has since slightly recovered, trading at around $0.9723 at 11:15 a.m. in Hong Kong, according to The Block’s price data . 

The stablecoin dropped below its U.S. dollar peg on Jan. 15 with reports of holders selling off hundreds of millions worth of TUSD. Binance data showed that in the past 24 hours, users sold around $238.3 million worth of TrueUSD via the TUSD-USDT trading pair, while traders purchased about $83.8 million. That indicates a net outflow of around $154.5 million.

On Jan. 10, reports surfaced that TrueUSD had paused its real-time attestations of its reserves, with one X user suspecting the company’s inability to collateralize the tokens. The company later attributed the incident to several internal errors, according to Protos . 

TrueUSD said on Wednesday that it has “fully upgraded its fiat reserve audit system” in partnership with Hong Kong-based accounting firm MooreHK. “The upgraded attestation report includes additional details about the reserve funds in the custody of its financial and fiduciary partners,” TrueUSD in the statement.

“With the recent announcement of MANTA in Binance’s launchpool program and the need to stake BNB or FDUSD — at the expense of other stablecoins like TUSD that might have been used in the past for launchpool staking — it seems that a horde of investors are selling the latter for the former,” Justin d'Anethan, head of APAC business development of crypto c823cbf8-b119-4384-acb4-1f75c4478445 maker Keyrock, explained to The Block earlier this week. 

TrueUSD, widely considered to be related to TRON founder Justin Sun, might also have been affected by the $100 million security breach on Sun’s cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, according to Nick Ruck, chief operating officer of ContentFi Labs.

The stablecoin issuer previously told The Block that the short-term mass arbitrage following the Binance Launchpool program is part of “normal market dynamics and liquidity adjustment.” 

TrueUSD did not immediately respond to The Block’s request on Thursday for additional comment.