Tether and Friedman LLP not working together anymore

Tether, the famous dollar-pegged cryptocurrency has dissolved its partnership with Friedman LLP. The latter provided their services to verify the bank statements of Tether. This made Tether a more transparent organization. However, the latest falling out will lead to unforeseeable troubles for Tether.
Tether made headlines when it started issuing tethers backed up by actual US dollars kept in the company's bank accounts. However, investors were doubtful that the claims of Tether could be verified. For this reason, Tether joined forces with Friedman LLP to get their financial statements checked and verified.

It is worth mentioning here that Friedman services cannot be considered an audit, as Friedman LLP only provides limited services to Tether. The following excerpt is taken from a post by Tether that clarified the nature of their relationship with Friedman:
Friedman was able to provide consulting services for us on an expedited basis, using a procedures date of September 15, 2017. These consulting services do not constitute an audit or attestation engagement, which would include a significantly expanded scope of procedures and take substantially more time to complete.

The wording of the post clarifies that Friedman’s services do not amount to an audit, and are just there to provide more transparency into how Tether operates.

The last few months had been good for Tether, especially as the company's board claims to have $2.2 billion in its bank accounts. The same number of tether tokens were issued to investors on a 1:1 parity.

However, the latest news revealed that Tether and Friedman LLP have had a falling out, and Friedman LLP will stop providing their services to Tether from now on. This would make it next to impossible to verify the claims of Tether’s dollar deposits.

There are already suspicions that Tether was inflating its token and not backing them up with actual dollars. At times, Tether would issue massive amounts of tokens. This would dilute the value of the tokens bought by investors to poured large sums of money into the company. Many tried to exit their open positions when this happened.

Another twist in the story is that Tether and Bitfinex share the same owners. Bitfinex had trouble with its banking partners and has since heavily relied on Tether for the provision of tokens to carry out transactions. This made the provision of large sums of tokens seem more suspicious and investors have started questioning Tether’s integrity. The latest development might lead to a deadly blow for Tether, as there is no way for the company to verify how much capital it currently possesses. It will be interesting to see how Tether handles the latest controversy and what will become of it.