Paolo Ardoino reports DDoS attack on Tether site

On June 18, the issuer of the stablecoin USDT came under a large-scale DDoS attack. The attackers demanded a ransom from Tether, said Paolo Ardoino, the company’s chief technology officer.

1/
This morning @Tether_to received a ransom request to avoid mass DDOSes.
They tried already once.
On a normal day we have around 2k reqs/5min
The attack brought us to 8M reqs/5min. pic.twitter.com/rWEan5VNFX

— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) June 18, 2022

“This morning Tether received a ransom demand to avoid mass DDoS attacks. They tried before. We usually have around 2,000 requests in five minutes. The attack brought the figure to 8 million requests in five minutes,” Ardoino wrote.

The tether.io portal allows exchanging stablecoins for US dollars at a 1:1 ratio. The minimum redemption amount is 100,000 USDT.

According to the CTO, Tether took steps to cushion the attack’s consequences, and the attackers have relaxed pressure on the system. He also stressed that the incident would not affect the ability to redeem USDT positions.

Despite the crypto market downturn, the stablecoin remained pegged to the US dollar, though its market capitalization continued to decline. On Friday it fell below $70 billion and at the time of writing was valued at $68.15 billion.

Since early May, the USDT market capitalization has fallen by 18%. Its closest competitor — USD Coin (USDC) from the Centre consortium — in the same period, by contrast, rose 12%.

In mid-May, USDT deviated from its peg to the US dollar, testing the $0.94 level. At the same time, USDC and Binance USD (BUSD) looked relatively stable.

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