>Who the hell even holds Tether? Don't people get it and then convert into a different crypto pretty quickly? Most crypto trading actually takes place outside

>Who the hell even holds Tether? Don't people get it and then convert into a different crypto pretty quickly? Most crypto trading actually takes place outside of the US. Imagine I want to predict the whole crypto market goes down, I want to short it. Ideally I'd like to short it relative to the USD, the world's reserve currency. But, as a random unregulated firm trading on an unregulated exchange, getting USD or something close to it is super painful from a compliance perspective, so ideally I'd prefer something that follows the price of the USD but is outside the scope of US regulators. Tether fulfils this shared need of non-US market participants, so they have incentive to keep acting as if it were real even though they know it's a scam. Tether then gets to extract a fee for this service by printing USDT.