TUSD: WTAF

Published in

ChainArgos

4 min readMar 14, 2023

We’ve written about the TrueUSD before. About how their highly-organized redemption process makes it easier to de-anonymize addresses and confirm the product has a small number of large users. Also how it has, um, laundry-machine-esque characteristics. Now it’s time to dig in to some of the corporate insanity. And potential regulatory issues.

Also bear in mind this product was still minting at Signature Bank over the weekend the bank got seized:

Note this is part clown-show and part “wow those clearly-identified people have some questions to answer.”

History

There are a bunch of entangled entities called TrueUSD, Truecoin, TrustLabs and similar things over the past few years. While there are an awful lot of documents connecting these up we are just gonna post a few screenshots which establish they are all the same folks overall:

So, yeah, they are the same. If you want more docs obviously we’ve got them.

Early History

But this thing was set up in 2018 by someone else:

And then the current team was brought on:

Notice those are the same folks. But what happened? Why is the founder gone and not referred to as founder anymore?

It Is Amazing

We will simply quote the lawsuit:

Just briefly we should note heis not claiming anything based on the corporate Slack which he deleted. So there’s that.

Go read the whole thing. All of this is public and has been forever.

Money Transmission

Ok so that’s all amusing and raises a red flag or two. But way back up there these companies also indicate they are a registered Money Service Business. And indeed they are:

Not in NY though. Does that impact:

A leaked client list via Dirty Bubble Media. That’s them on the right.

That’s probably a good question for their NY-registered lawyer:

And how do we know it was money at Signature? Because the declared balance at Signet on their own real-time attestation went up by the same amount at the same time. Compare: