USDC is not an investment, it's a tokenized market money fund which you can redeem for 1$. Circle, they company issuing it, said that they will honoring redempetions 1:1 from tomorrow (weekend they can't because of bank closures).
Also the trading volume of stablecoins and of the largest cryptocurrencies is close on most day to NASDAQ's listed equities trading volume.
Apparently the size of Tether seems huge, 34 B$ of dollar-denominate liabilities, but Binance, the largest exchange, has most fiat customer deposits in USDT. Moreover, in the last year futures trading has moved from Bitcoin margined to USDT margined and it is very profitable. So I wouldn’t be surprised if large funds are trading those future markets and they require USDT.
But offcourse it could still be insolvent if they issued too much or simply made insolvent if the assets (t-bills, cd) backing the issuances are frozen from US authorities. Just assume that as a known risk and plan accordingly
Kind of, see the monthly attestations at https://www.paxos.com/attestations/ . It's significantly better than USDT, but IMHO not fully at a level where you can say "properly audited" without any caveats.
