Tether has never been convertible back to dollars through Tether directly unless you are dealing with astronomical sums - they make no claim (and maybe never ha

Tether has never been convertible back to dollars through Tether directly unless you are dealing with astronomical sums - they make no claim (and maybe never have?) of convertibility on their web site. If the average person with a few thousand dollars of Tether wants to get out, they need to first get that value to an exchange that supports real US Dollars. In order to do that, they likely have to do an intermediate sell to some other widely held and accepted coin or token (Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP), since most exchanges that seem to deal with Tether do not deal with USD, and vise versa. If there were a run on Tether in particular, one of the effects you might expect to see is prices of the most widely traded coins going up in price on crypto-dominant exchanges, and the price of those same coins going down in exchanges with free (as in low friction) convertibility to cash withdrawals. This particular effect would only be one of many though, so the signal might not even be noticeable above the noise of the markets. You can imagine that Tether being proved to be insolvent or a fraud in enough people's eyes (and also close enough to insolvency to spread panic: fractional reserves with illiquid holdings [at best], insolvencies, and outright Ponzi schemes [at worst] can last far longer than you might expect), would cause a lot of other additional, and probably larger, market movement.