The price of Tether isn’t down much today- just 0.5%, which is a drop of $0.0005 (USDT/USD), but the price isn’t where the main movement is at with this crypto. To find out if it is healthy, we have to look at the trade volume, which has dropped down to $97,939,974,577.34. That means USDT has lost over a fifth of its trade volume in the last 24 hours.

Tether’s Tough Year

It’s still the highest ranking, most used stablecoin in the crypto market, but Tether suffered a blow the last few weeks. Fines from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were levied against the organization behind Tether on October 15^th. This fine of $41 million is only the latest of several fines the organization has had to endure this year, and it all comes back to claims of Tether coins not being fully backed by US dollars.

The promise of Tether when it launched was that every token would be backed by a US dollar, creating a 1:1 relation that made it the premier stablecoin. That may have been true initially, but it doesn’t seem to be the case at this point. Investigations found that Tether tokens were often backed by digital assets rather than fiat ones, crippling Tether’s ability to stand by its promise in a way that made investors and regulators happy.

It should be said that findings showed that Tether is fully backed all the time. That’s not the issue; the issue is that the backing was not all in real-world currency. The investigation showed that sometimes the currency backing wasn’t even being held in a bank account with Tether’s name attached to it. These kinds of shady dealings did not live up to the initial promise of Tether, which is why it has been under investigation through so much of the year and why consumer faith in the stablecoin is not as stable as its founders would like.

Is Tether Still Relevant?

Despite a drop in trade volume, Tether is still ranked #4 among the cryptocurrencies of the day, but it is definitely not seeing the kind of excitement from investors that it used to. Expect the price to hold close to that 1:1 relationship to the US dollar, but trade volume could continue to fall and interest wane in this crypto unless some serious changes are made.