In a strongly-worded blog post this week, Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings - the division of Weiss Ratings that focuses solely on cryptocurrency analysis - issued a strong warning against the dollar-pegged Tether (USDT) token.
Weiss analyst Juan Villaverde told cryptocurrency investors to avoid storing digital assets on exchanges (Bianance, Bittrex, Poloniex etc..) that use Tether, as well as not to trade any USDT-based pairs.
Previous warnings regarding Tether, usually made on various social media channels by concerned investors, were disregarded by skeptics on the grounds that Tether's market capitalization is a minuscule portion of the overall value of the entire crypto market.
This line of thinking was successfully used by skeptics to assuage investors' worries, but Villaverde says that Tether's daily turnover figures paint a very different picture:
"Tether is the third-largest cryptocurrency by trading volume, behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are also used as liquidity.," writes Villaverde.
Additionaly, Villaverde postulates that a run and/or failures of Tether has the potential to "cause exchange failures."
To drive his point home, Villaverde also pointed out that Tether management has not provided an audit from a reputable firm, despite repeatedly being asked to do so:
"The big issue: There’s never been an audit, and the folks behind Tether have not been transparent when asked. They have continuously claimed their tokens are backed 100% by actual dollars, yet they have failed to present evidence to support this claim."On a more positive note, Villaverde concludes that even in a worst-case scenario where Tether turns out to be fraudulent and goes under, cryptocurrencies will survive due to their revolutionary impact on "everything from finance to the legal industry to society itself."
