Disclaimer: This article is intended to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the views of the author and does not represent the official position of Mars Finance.
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Source: Unitimes Unicorn Times
The Mystery of Tether's $69 Billion Reserve
Written by Zeke Faux
Source: Bloomberg
Edit: South Wind
In July, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen convened a meeting of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and six other senior officials to discuss Tether. It's impossible for them not to be unaware of the absurdity of the situation: rising inflation in the United States, an increase in the coronavirus pandemic threatening economic recovery, and Yellen's desire to discuss a digital currency, Tether, designed by a former child star who missed a penalty in the movie The Mighty Ducks. But Tether has grown enough to put the U.S. financial system at risk. It was as if a snowball fight on the playground had escalated so wildly that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been called together to avoid a nuclear war.
Tether is known in the financial world as a "stablecoin" because each Tether (USDT) should be backed by a $1 reserve. But it's actually more like a bank. Tether Holdings Ltd., the company that issued the currency, receives dollars from those who want to trade cryptocurrencies, and in return, the company will credit an equal amount of Tether to their digital wallets. Once you have Tether, you can send them to cryptocurrency exchanges and use them to bet on the price of Bitcoin, ETH, or any other thousands of cryptocurrencies.
In theory, at least, Tether Holdings holds a reserve of dollars so that the company can return dollars to anyone who wants to redeem their Tether into dollars. This complex mechanism is popular because real banks don't want to do business with cryptocurrency companies, especially foreign ones.
Exactly how Tether's release was supported, or whether it was actually supported, has been a mystery. For years, critics have argued that Tether Holdings doesn't have enough assets to maintain a 1:1 exchange rate despite assurances, meaning that the Tether it issues is essentially a fraud. But in the Crypto world, where joke coins based on dog heads can reach a market capitalization of billions of dollars, and scammers regularly make a lot of money through ridiculous-sounding schemes, Tether seems like just another miracle.
This year, Tether Holdings began issuing a large number of such digital currencies. There are currently 69 billion Tethers (USDTs) in circulation, of which 48 billion were released this year. That means the company should hold a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back up these digital currencies — a figure that would make the company one of the 50 largest U.S. banks if the company were a U.S. bank rather than an unregulated offshore company.
On the trading floors of Twitter, Business TV, hedge funds and investment banks, everyone began to ask why Tether minted so many coins and whether the company really had the money reserves it claimed. An anonymous anti-Tether blog titled "The Bit Short: Inside Crypto's Doomsday Machine" quickly went viral, while CNBC host Jim Cramer told viewers to sell their cryptocurrency and warned, "If Tether crashes, it will destroy the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem." ”
As far as regulators are concerned, the dollar reserve assets that need to be used to support Tether are too large, and even if the company does have enough dollar reserve assets, it is still dangerous. That's because if enough traders immediately demand redemption of their dollars, the company may have to liquidate its assets at a loss, triggering a "run" on the non-banking institution. These losses could flood into the regulated financial system, leading to a collapse in the credit market. If these voices against Tether are right, Tether is a Ponzi scheme, then it will be bigger than Bernie Madoff's scam. [Editor's note: Madoff was the initiator behind the largest "Ponzi scheme" in the world's financial history, with tens of thousands of victims and $65 billion in fraud.] ]
So earlier this year, I set out to solve the puzzle. The company's capital footprint spans from Taiwan to Puerto Rico, the French Riviera, Chinese mainland and the Bahamas. A former banker who worked at Tether told me that the company's executives put their reserves at risk, making potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for themselves. "It's not a stablecoin, it's a high-risk offshore hedge fund," said John Betts, who runs a bank in Puerto Rico, which Tether has used. "Even Tether's own banking partners don't know how big their reserves are, or if they have them."
"Crypto Banking"
On the company's website, a green pentagon with a white T letter represents Tether coin and claims to be "Digital money for a digital age." The logo doesn't look great, but it's probably the most normal thing about Tether Holdings, which is weird in almost every conceivable place. LinkedIn shows the company has just over a dozen employees, a minuscule number for a company that manages $69 billion in assets.
Tether's website is also touting its settlement with the New York Attorney General's Office, but the announcement of that settlement makes it feel like the company is doing something terrible. U.S. Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that Tether Holdings has always been "run by unlicensed, unregulated individuals and entities that trade in the darkest corners of the financial system."
Elsewhere on the site, there is a letter from an accounting firm saying Tether has reserves to support its stablecoins, while a pie chart shows that about $30 billion of the company's holdings are invested in commercial paper — short-term loans to businesses. This would make Tether the seventh-largest holder of such bonds, behind Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group.
To verify this claim, a few colleagues and I consulted with some Wall Street traders to see if anyone knew what Tether had purchased (commercial paper). No one said they knew about it. "It's a very small market where a lot of people know each other," said Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer for global money markets at Pittsburgh asset management firm Federated Hermes. "If there are new entrants, it's usually very obvious."
It's unclear which regulator is responsible for regulating Tether. A representative of the company had said on the podcast that the company was registered with the BVI Financial Investigation Agency. But Errol George, the head of the financial institution, told me in an email that the agency does not regulate Tether. "We don't, and we never have, [regulated Tether]."
J.L. Van der Velde, the company's current CEO listed on Tether's website, is a Hong Kong-based Dutchman who never appears to have been interviewed or spoken at a conference. The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was described on Tether's website as the founder of a successful electronics business. The only mention of him in a search of an Italian newspaper showed that he had been fined for selling pirated Microsoft software. He doesn't respond to emails or Telegram messages, and his nickname on Telegram is Merlinthewizard.
Tether's lawyer, Stuart Hoegner, told me on the phone that Van der Velde and Giancarlo Devasini prefer to avoid the spotlight. He called Tether's critics the jihadists who wanted to destroy the company. "We maintain a clear, comprehensive and mature risk management framework to safeguard and invest in reserves," he said. He added that no customer has ever asked for redemption of dollars that has been rejected.
But when I asked Tether where to put the money, he refused to answer. When he told me that the company had enough cash to pay the most money ever made in a single day, I didn't reassure myself. Bank runs can last more than 24 hours. Subsequently, Hoegner responded to follow-up questions in an emailed statement, saying my report was "nothing more than a compilation of insinuations and misinformation shared by disgruntled people who are not involved or directly aware of the company's operations." He added: "[Tether's] success alone speaks for itself. ”
It's unbelievable that people would send $69 billion in real dollars to a company that seems to actually be full of red flags. But every day, on cryptocurrency exchanges, traders buy and sell Tether coins as if they were as good as the dollar. On some days, Tether changed hands more than $100 billion. It seems that the people who hold the most assets in the cryptocurrency market trust Tether, and I wonder why. Fortunately, in June, 12,000 people gathered in Miami for what has been called the largest cryptocurrency conference ever.
At the Mana Wynwood convention center, I found the common embarrassing crypto symbol. The models walked around the floor with the Bitcoin logo painted on them. One podcast host screamed, "F*** Elon." A bin filled with Venezuelan bolivars read "Cash is garbage." It's full of Tether holders. Sam Bankman-Fried, a 29-year-old billionaire and founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, told me that he bought billions of dollars in Tether to facilitate transactions in other cryptocurrencies. "If you're a crypto company, banks are nervous about working with you," he says.
If you still think of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer (P2P) currency, a clever way to transfer value without intermediaries, then his explanation doesn't make much sense. But most people don't use cryptocurrency to buy things. They trade cryptocurrencies on exchanges, betting on its value, hoping to make a fortune on the next Dogecoin, after all, after Elon Musk started tweeting the news of Dogecoin, Dogecoin soared 4191% this year, while Solana seemed to have risen 9801% for no reason in 2021.
We might as well think of crypto exchanges as giant casinos. Many cryptocurrency exchanges, especially those outside the U.S., are unable to process dollars because banks are reluctant to open accounts for them so as not to inadvertently facilitate money laundering. So, when users of these exchanges want to bet, they need to buy some Tether first. It's as if all the poker rooms in Monte Carlo and all the mahjong halls in Macau have to send gamblers to a central cash register to buy chips.
Some of the biggest traders on these exchanges tell me that they often buy and sell Tether for hundreds of millions of dollars and see it as the industry standard. Even so, many people have their own conspiracy theories about Tethers, such as the government allowing it to become larger so that criminals who use it can be tracked down. I realized that they didn't trust Tether, but they needed Tether to trade and use it to make money. "It might be more volatile, but I don't care," said Dan Matuszewski, co-founder of cryptocurrency investment firm CMS Holdings LLC.
The beginning of stablecoins
In the 19th century, hunters, hunters, and cowboys on the U.S. border faced a shortage of currency. The U.S. government did not issue paper money, only gold and silver because early leaders feared inflation—in the words of John Adams (the second president of the United States), inflation was "a succession of major thefts." As a result, some states allow banks to print their own banknotes, which can be exchanged for dollar coins when needed. However, some banks do not hold corresponding reserves. These institutions came to be known as "wildcats" (wildcats), supposedly because they set up branches in remote areas where wildlife was infested, thus preventing borrowers from bringing paper money to exchange.
Eventually many of these banks failed. At the time, a Bank in Michigan had deceived the censors by filling the boxes with nails and glass and then covering them with a thin layer of silver coins, and the censors were not deceived. "What a temptation it was for unscrupulous speculators and adventurers who dreamed only of wealth and were ready to take every risk to pursue it," Alpheus Felch, then commissioner of the National Bank, later wrote.
Nearly two centuries later, the same temptation came before Tether co-founder Brock Pierce, a former child star who played a younger version of Emilio Estevez in the Mighty Ducks film series. Now, Pierce wears an exaggerated hat, vest and bracelet, like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, who likes to play dumb puzzles, like Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Pierce, who created a successful brokerage firm that bought and sold video game products, hired Steve Bannon-Pierce, who would later become Trump's military master, and Pierce was one of the few bitcoiners in the early days who had real money to invest. "I'm not an amateur entrepreneur who throws darts blindfolded," he told me on the phone as he was preparing to go to El Salvador to promote bitcoin. "I am a midwife of creation. I only do the impossible. ”
Pierce said he came up with the idea of stablecoins in 2013 with programmer Craig Sellars. To run the company, Pierce hired Reeve Collins as the first CEO of Tether, best known for inventing pop-up web browser ads. They also worked with Phil Potter, an executive at the offshore bitcoin exchange Bitfinex, who was working on a similar project at the time, which they named: Tether. They work in a bungalow in Santa Monica, Calif., to promote venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs. But no VC firm was interested at the time.
The problem is that, like other cryptocurrencies, Tether breaks almost all the rules of the banking industry. Banks track everyone who has an account and where they send money, enabling law enforcement agencies to track criminals' transactions. Tether Holdings checks the identity of the person who bought bitcoin directly from the company, but once Tether circulates around the world, the stablecoin can be transferred anonymously, simply by sending a code. For example, drug lords can hold millions of Tethers in digital wallets and send them to terrorists without anyone knowing.
Such concerns are not theoretical. In May 2013, Arthur Budovsky, inventor of the stablecoin Liberty Reserve, was arrested in Spain and eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money. Prosecutors said the anonymous online currency attracted scammers, credit card thieves, hackers and other criminals. Arthur Budovsky wrote in an email sent to me at the Federal Prison in Florida: "The United States will track Tether in due course. "Currently, Budovsky is serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison in Florida." [I] almost feel sorry for them, the Tether company," he wrote.
That prospect led Pierce and Collins to abandon Tether about a year later, in 2015. But Bitfinex exchange executive Phil Potter is less worried about Tether's legitimacy because, as he said in his 2019 podcast, his exchange already operates in a gray area. Potter's boss is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon (nominally Devasini is tether's chief financial officer, but people who have dealt with the company say Devasini is actually the head of Tether). Potter and Devasini agreed to buy their partner's stake with the money they invested, less than $1 million. Pierce said he handed over his shares for free at the time.
Devasini was 50 years old at the time, and by the standards of the crypto field, he was very old. Property records show that he frequently travels between Milan and Monaco, and his home overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. Devasini in the photo is a tall, handsome man with long curly hair and a scarf wrapped around his neck. In 2014, he was working as a model at a photo exhibition in a gallery in Milan, standing in front of a mirror with half a shaving pad on his face (see pictured above), looking into his eyes, and the expression on his face showed that he didn't know himself anymore. In subsequent interviews, he said his turning point came in 1992, when he emerged from his career as a plastic surgeon. "All my work is like a hoax, a product of a whim," he said. ”
He previously entered the low-end electronics industry, founding a series of technology companies that imported memory chips and set-top boxes. He also opened an online shopping website in Italy. In 2012, Devasini invested in cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, an emerging exchange founded by a young Frenchman who copied the source code from a failed exchange. Devasini soon became the de facto head of the exchange company. Bitfinex performs more reliably than other exchanges, as other exchanges tend to crash after stealing or losing user funds. In 2016, about a third of the exchange's funds were stolen in a hack, after which the exchange compensated users.
Bitfinex and Tether struggled to access the regulated financial system from the start. They took a series of less reliable workarounds to keep corporate bank accounts working — "a lot of cat-and-mouse tricks," Potter said in an online chat with traders. But as more and more people trade on Bitfinex, and other exchanges begin to accept Tether, it's getting harder and harder to keep a low profile. As of March 2017, Tether had more than $50 million in circulating capital. The following month, several Taiwanese banks that Tether and Bitfinex had been using closed their accounts, much to the desperation of Devasini executives, who, according to people familiar with the matter, even considered renting a plane and air-airing out stacks of cash.
Eventually, they found a financial institution in Puerto Rico called Noble Bank International LLC, which was willing to work with them. I met the company's founder, John Betts, in Manhattan, who explained that Tether was a legitimate business, or at least this when he was the company's banker: "During the time tether had banking with Noble, our bank held more than 98 percent of their cash reserves and received and verified monthly bills from their other accounts. ”
Tether's connection to Bitfinex
From the beginning, cryptocurrencies have attracted skeptics who are as enthusiastic as the cryptocurrency supporters I met in Miami. In April 2017, these skeptics set out to target Tether. That month, an anonymous commentator on Twitter (pseudonym Bitfinex'ed) claimed that Tether had no support at all. He asked on Twitter where Tether was putting its money and why it didn't produce audited financial statements. Bitfinex'ed tweeted: "They are actually Dave & Busters/Chuck-e-Cheese tokens. These ideas and other similar claims circulated in the cryptocurrency space and eventually in Washington, leading to an investigation into Tether by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
At the same time, cryptocurrency trading is booming and Tether stablecoins are growing in popularity, with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion by the end of 2017. According to investors, Bitfinex made a profit of $326 million that year. Devasini's stake was worth more than $100 million at the time. That made Tether and Bitfinex the biggest customers of Noble, but John Betts, founder of Noble, believes Devasini put the bank at risk by allowing rumors about Tether reserves to spread. Betts told me he had urged Devasini to hire an accounting firm to produce a comprehensive audit report to reassure the public, but Devasini said Tether didn't have to respond to outside criticism.
Devasini may be so obscure for a reason. Tether's website has long promised: "Every Tether is backed by a 1:1 ratio of traditional currencies held in our reserves." But Betts said Devasini wants to use those reserves to invest. If Tether had really had $1 billion in reserves at the time, assuming a 1% return on investment, the annual profit would have reached $10 million.
Betts sees this as a conflict of interest for Devasini, as any investment proceeds will be owned by Devasini and his partners, but if the investment fails, Tether holders may lose everything. When Betts objected, Devasini blamed him. "Devasini wanted a higher rate of return," says Betts. "I repeatedly begged him to be patient and do the work with the auditor."
Tether's leaders want to divest from Noble Bank. But Phil Potter disagreed, so Devasini and other partners bought Potter's stake in Tether for $300 million in June 2018. That same month, Betts resigned from Noble Bank for health and family reasons. His partners later accused in court of using the company's funds for high-end hotel and private jet travel; He said traveling was for work. In any case, Devasini withdrew his deposits from the Noble Bank, which soon went out of business.
In the summer of 2018, Devasini faced another crisis. Documents disclosed after the new York Attorney General's Office filed the lawsuit show that his Bitfinex exchange had entrusted $850 million to Crypto Capital Corp., a panamanian money transfer service, as a workaround for its banking problems. But the documents show that Crypto Capital's abrupt refusal to send the money back to Bitfinex left the company unable to pay customers who wanted to withdraw cash. This is a dangerous situation – if the public is aware of it, it could trigger a bank run.
So Devasini gave the client all sorts of excuses and asked Crypto Capital for some cash. As part of the lawsuit, the content of his conversation was made public. In 2018, Devasini wrote to the founders of Crypto Capital: "We are facing a large number of (user) withdrawals, and unless we can transfer some funds, we can no longer face this situation." Another time, Devasini said, "Understand that all of this can be extremely dangerous for everyone, for the entire crypto community." ”
It turned out that Polish prosecutors seized Crypto Capital's account. They later claimed that Crypto Capital laundered money for customers, including Colombian drug cartels. U.S. prosecutors will indict one of its principals, Oz Yosef, who has yet to respond to the allegations in court for bank fraud. (Hoegner, an attorney for Tether and Bitfinex, said both companies were deceived by Crypto Capital, believing they were complying with regulations.) )
Devasini did not disclose the news of Bitfinex's bankruptcy, but instead misappropriated Tether's reserves to fill the gap, leaving Tether supported only by a portion of the reserves.
In February 2019, Tether revised its 1:1 Reserve Commitment, changing its website and writing: "Every Tether is 100% backed by our reserves, which include traditional currency and cash equivalents, and may occasionally include other assets and receivables that Tether lends to third parties, including Tether's affiliated entities." The change suggested Tether was using its reserves for lending, but few people noticed it at the time. The loans became known to the public until April 2019, when the New York Attorney General's Office sued Tether in an attempt to force it to hand over documents.
Surprisingly, despite devasini losing a lot of users' money, the cryptocurrency world hasn't lost faith in him. In May 2019, a consortium of major traders bailed out Bitfinex, investing an additional $1 billion in the company. The exchange used the money to repay loans provided by Tether Holdings. In 2020, when crypto trading began to take off during the pandemic, Tether achieved exponential growth, with 17 billion tethers being issued. So far in 2021, Tether has added 48 billion new circulation.
In February, Tether agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General's Office, but did not admit to his misconduct. Proponents argue the settlement is in support of Tether — if Tether is a huge hoax, will the New York State Attorney General reconcile with it? But in Washington, the investigation continues. Earlier this year, prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to Devasini and other Tether executives informing them that they were the target of a criminal investigation into bank fraud. The government is investigating whether they cheated banks into opening accounts a few years ago. "Tether regularly engages in open dialogue with law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department, as part of our commitment to cooperation and transparency," the company said in a statement.
Written documents
Tether has still not disclosed where its funds are deposited. The only financial institution I can find willing to say I am currently working with is Deltec Bank & Trust in the Bahamas. I met Jean Chalopin, the bank's chairman, in deltec's office. Deltec's offices are located on the top floor of a six-story building in Nassau (Panama's capital) and are surrounded by palm trees. In the past, Jean Chalopin collaborated on the cartoon Inspector Gadget, and on the door of his office hangs a painting of a trench coated robotic cop in the 1980s. The magazine cover is displayed on the bookshelf, and the cover is Chalopin's wife, who has worked as a model, and her daughter is a singer. Chalopin, 71, has fluffy red hair and a pair of rimless round glasses. When we sat down, he pulled out of his bookshelf a book on financial fraud, Misplaced Trus. "People do interesting things for money," he said mysteriously.
He made himself a cup of tea and told me he sold his first animation studio, DIC Entertainment, in 1987 and later came to the Bahamas. The deal made him rich — he bought a castle outside Paris, a pink colony in the Bahamas, and later the home of the film's villain in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. He worked at deltec bank and later became friends with the company's aging founder.
The bank, which once operated investment banking throughout Latin America, has shrunk its assets to just a few billion dollars. Chalopin invested in it and eventually became the bank's largest shareholder. Banks in the Bahamas are often portrayed in movies as a money launderer's paradise, but Chalopin says Deltec's strength lies in customer service, not confidentiality. He decided to look for clients in new business areas such as biotechnology, gene editing and artificial intelligence, which were too small to get the personal attention of big banks. Another area is cryptocurrencies. "Cryptocurrencies are like, 'Don't touch it, it's dangerous,'" he said. "If you dig a little deeper, you'll find that's not the case."
He said that in 2017, a customer who got rich through Bitcoin introduced him to Tether's Devasini. Devasini made an Italian risotto for Chalopin and was impressed by his bluntness. When they discovered that Devasini and Chalopin's mother grew up in the same Italian village, they began calling each other cugino (cousins). Devasini bought a house near chalopin's home in the Bahamas, where they bought the waterfront plot together and divided it between the two properties. Chalopin told me that Tether had been unjustly slandered. "There is no agenda or conspiracy," he said. "They're not Enron or Madoff. When something goes wrong, they fix it decently. ”
Chalopin said he conducted months of investigations into Tether before accepting Tether as a customer of Deltec Bank in November 2018. He signed a letter guaranteeing his assets. To his surprise, critics still insist that Tether coins are not backed by cash. "Frankly, the most important thing at the time was that people thought , 'Its reserves of funds simply didn't exist,'" he said. "We know the money exists! Right here (Deltec Bank). ”
But when I asked Chalopin if he was sure tether's assets were now completely safe, he laughed. He said it was a difficult question to answer. He holds only Tether's cash and extremely low-risk bonds. But recently Tether has started using other banks to handle its funds. Only a quarter (about $15 billion) is still in Deltec Bank. "I can't say things I don't know," he said. "I can only control what we can control."
When I returned to the U.S., I got a document showing Tether Holdings' detailed reserve accounts. These include billions of dollars in short-term loans to large Chinese companies, which money market funds avoid, the documents show. And that was before China Evergrande Group, one of China's biggest real estate developers, began to collapse. I also learned that Tether has also provided billions of dollars worth of loans to other crypto companies, which are collateralized in Bitcoin.
One of them is Celsius Network Ltd., founder Alex masinsky told me that it is a large quasi-bank for cryptocurrency investors. He said the company pays a 5 to 6 percent interest rate on the roughly 1 billion Tether loans it borrows.
Tether denies holding any Evergrande bonds, but its lawyer, Hoegner, declined to say whether Tether owns other Chinese commercial paper. Hoegner said the vast majority of Tether's commercial paper is rated high by credit rating companies, and the risk of its guaranteed loans is also low because borrowers have to offer bitcoins that are worth more than the borrowed money. "As we've consistently demonstrated, all Tethers are fully backed up," the company said in a statement posted on its website after this article was published.
The size of Tether's investments and loans secured by cryptocurrencies in China can be quite large. If Devasini takes on enough risks for Tether's entire reserves to return even 1 percent, he and his partners will make $690 million a year in profits. But if those loans fail, even a small fraction of them will be worth less than $1. In this case, any investor holding Tether will have an incentive to redeem Tether; if someone else redeems it first, Tether's reserves may dry up. A bank run will be staged.
In July, officials in a meeting at the Treasury Department were discussing regulating Tether like a bank, which would force Devasini to finally announce where its reserves were going and even weaken Tether by issuing an official U.S. stablecoin. Curiously, at least so far, most participants in the cryptocurrency market, including some very large and complex operators, do not seem to care about any risk. Just last month, traders bought $3 billion in newly minted Tether, presumably injecting billions of dollars into Jean Chalopin's Bahamian bank Deltec in exchange for Tether coins created by Giancarlo Devasini and managed by Tether executives who have become targets of U.S. criminal investigations.
This situation bears similarities to the "wildcat" era of U.S. banking. When President Abraham Lincoln began printing federal banknotes and imposing prohibitively high taxes on other currencies in the early days of the American Civil War, the "Wildcat" paper money situation ended. These "wildcat" banknotes, which once powered the economy of frontier cities, are now abandoned. Some people give them to children to play with. In rural areas, they are used as wallpaper.
**This article represents the views of the original author only and does not constitute any investment opinion or recommendation.
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