The issue behind Tether is that as more people transfer holdings to USDT, Tether has to print or create more tokens and put them in circulation. As long as the company has the fiat assets to back that up, theres no cause for concern. And obviously, they have those assets, right?
Yeah about that. While Tether certainly claim to have almost $3 billion USD required to back up USDT, the lack of transparency on that claim is a major cause for concern. Tether recently dissolved the relationship between them and their third party auditor, and have stated that they cant reveal their account balance due to issues with the US government. Unfortunately I can't trust 100% on that.
USDT is likely backed almost completely, scams are something that is all-too-frequent within the crypto community, but I don't think that anyone would be able to cover up $3B disappearing, or a company not maintaining the $3B required to back the currency. Now it
is concerning that Bitfinex was using their USDT to cover up a bunch of lost crypto value, and that might have an impact on the trust that's still in USDT. Hopefully, they can find another auditor so that everyone can retain their confidence and we won't have to go through another coin collapsing.
USDT is ingenious in one way while also being extremely concerning considering the conditions of its existence. There's no real way to decentralize a backed currency, and that's the only major pitfall I can see with USDT. Time will tell if we're going to be scammed once again or if they'll pull through. Currently, it looks like it'll be the latter, at least for now.