Back in January, the controversial cryptocurrency Tether (USDT), “anchor[ed] to the price of national currencies like the U.S. dollar, the Euro, and the Yen,” as its website puts it, found itself in the midst of an existential crisis. For months, concerns had been circulating in the media and in online forums that something was off. The company that produced the coin, Tether Limited, had promised since its inception that for each unit it created on the blockchain, one actual U.S. dollar would be held in reserve. But in August 2017, a blogger on Hackernoon.com who goes by Bitfinex’ed started raising questions about whether Tether was really sitting on all those greenbacks. If it wasn’t, the coin wouldn’t really be tethered at all.