Yesterday, Bloomberg's Businessweek published a feature about Tether's $69 billion stablecoin, or more specifically about its backing assets. A highlight of the piece is the author Zeke Faux's description of Tether as "a company that seemed to be practically quilted out of red flags". One of the things that alarms regulators is its rapid growth.

Are popular crypto stablecoins the next subprime CDOs, or even outright Ponzi schemes? Find out why I advise investors to sell or avoid Tether.

No matter what you believe about USDT-Tether-it is beyond question that the stablecoin has become integral to the digital asset industry. It's the most-traded digital asset by a significant margin, and the network of exchanges surrounding Tether hold significant amounts of USDT.

It has long been known that over the past decade Chinese oligarchs who wanted to bypass Beijing's capital controls and anti-money laundering firewall, would smuggle billions of dollars outside of China by using the Macau casino money-laundering infrastructure, prompting Beijing to crack down aggressively on this popular firewall loophole, with mixed success.