I'm surprised that being associated with Coinbase (of "we're NOT going to agree that black lives matter, so stop asking already" fame) and the giant scam
that is USDT is not regarded yet by these people as reputation damage.
A company wants to focus on their product or service instead of getting entangled into the clown festival of social justice politics, a topic that has nothing to do with said product or service.
The people calling ‘USDT’ a scam probably haven’t used it. For the past 5 years, Tether has been the most amazing way for me to transfer dollars across exchanges, or just to hold during market drawdowns.
The fact that it is unregulated, and weakly subject to AML/KYC is a feature for me, not a problem. My money, my business, not the governments.
No, the people calling USDT a scam know that it's backed by nothing, and Tether has no obligation whatsoever to redeem them, ever (it's in their T&Cs).
Their banking partner, Deltec, in the Bahamas is chaired by the man who created the Inspector Gadget TV series.
[edit] Tethers are chuck-e-cheese tokens that became so integral to the entire cryptocurrency market (90% of ETH inflow and 80% of BTC inflow are Tether, not dollars) that nobody can do anything other than pretend they're legitimate. Because if they're not - and they're not - then the whole thing falls down.
Why do you say $10B out of curiosity? The last hard numbers we had were when they issued ~2.5B, and had $800M siezed because they banked with a money launderer (CryptoCapital). If you look at the Bahamian government's report on domestic banks with USD on deposit, the total for all banks grew $1B last year while over $20B Tethers were issued.
Further, let's say they have $10B. If all of those are the proceeds of money laundering (and let's face it, they probably are, after all, why would anyone give Tether money when they could give Circle money or Coinbase money) - then they'd all be forfeit anyways.
And even if that's not true, they're under no obligation to redeem Tether tokens. Ever. It's in the T&Cs.
Tether reserves the right to delay the redemption or withdrawal of Tether Tokens if such delay is necessitated by the illiquidity or unavailability or loss of any Reserves held by Tether to back the Tether Tokens, and Tether reserves the right to redeem Tether Tokens by in-kind redemptions of securities and other assets held in the Reserves. Tether makes no representations or warranties about whether Tether Tokens that may be traded on the Site may be traded on the Site at any point in the future, if at all. [1]
Arcticbull was very clever to check the Bahamain government report. It's interesting to see how much money can be laundered and hidden, but $10bn starts to be noticeable.
Tether is completely and utterly toxic to US banks. So much so that when they bought Noble bank in Puerto Rico, Noble was driven into bankruptcy because their US mainland correspondent bank cut them off instantly and absolutely nobody would touch the relationship. There was an entire saga with them trying to find a US correspondent bank, and getting shut down by each and every one, one at a time. I can say with total and complete confidence that there is no correspondent bank in the US. Remember, this is why they had to bank with money launderer CryptoCapital in the first place.
Further, one of the Tether clowns has stated his defense for printing huge piles of Tether on a Saturday morning is that all of the major exchanges and OTC desks actually have accounts with Deltec and they're doing an intra-account transfer. [edit] it was Paolo.
Last, in their weird vlog post, someone at Deltec admitted they had a huge stake in Bitcoin, which more than likely represents the assets "backing" Tether. They printed tether, bought bitcoin with it, drove up the price, and used it to back their tokens.
You should be utterly and totally terrified of Tether and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you a bridge.
[edit] FWIW, I've heard rumors of them buying up small community banks in the US to force them to take on the relationship. You know, like money launderers do. That's the only way I could see them having a US routing number.