Launched as Realcoin in July 2014, Tether aimed to become a more reliable alternative to Bitcoin. Today with a $4.1bn market capitalisation, it is now the fifth-largest virtual currency. However, its efforts to gain investors’ trust have fallen short. On October 6th, a group filed a class-action lawsuit in New York, accusing Tether of being “part-fraud, part-pump-and-dump, and part-money laundering”. They call for truly startling damages: more than $1.4trn.
Read more at The Economist