About $31 million of USDT tokens were stolen from Tether in November 2017. In response to the theft, Tether suspended trading, and stated it would roll out new software to implement an emergency "hard fork" in order to render untradable all of the tokens that Tether identified as stolen in the heist. Tether has stated that as of December 19, 2017, it has re-enabled limited wallet services and has begun processing the backlog of pending trades.
New account registration is still pending roll out.
Tether is pegged to the United States Dollar it operates as a currency board, holding United States Dollar in reserve and issuing a cryptocurrency token for each reserve dollar. The exchange rate is 1 Tether (USD₮) to 1 United States Dollar (USD$). Tether can be stored as value, spent as a medium of exchange and has a fixed unit of account like a traditional fiat currency.
The Tether model is to hold all United States Dollars in reserve so that it can meet customer withdrawals upon demand. Tether purports to make reserve account holdings publicly available; however, these holdings are in the process of being audited. In the event of a liquidity crisis, insolvency and/or government ban, exchanges and counterparties can exchange Tether in lieu of United States Dollars.Tether allows customers to conduct financial transactions in United States dollars without using the actual fiat currency, without intermediaries, and without banks.