If the issuer is well-regulated and the funds are kept in a regulated bank (or held in US Treasuries) then what you're doing is "tokenizing" existing banking in

If the issuer is well-regulated and the funds are kept in a regulated bank (or held in US Treasuries) then what you're doing is "tokenizing" existing banking infrastructure. This makes it easier for participants to quickly settle transactions and move fiat balances, without having to work through slow ACH-type networks or place major trust in their counterparties. There are still some risks (company will get hacked, executives will go rogue, banks won't be prepared for a major run) but these are fundamentally the sort of risks that the US banking industry has some experience with. These risks have nothing to do with what's going on at Tether: they don't seem to be regulated at all.