Tether is a cryptocurrency with a growing reputation. Very recently, Tether has been noted to have some impact on the value of Bitcoin, in fact research has recently found that Tether has been used to manipulate the price of Bitcoin, bringing into question a whole host of problems and questions.Regardless of this, Tether has seen some growth recently, moving up to ninth place for market capitalisation according to Coinmarketcap.com, with a market cap at the time of writing, of $2,700,621,552.00. As we know, Tether is considered a stablecoin, this is because the value of Tether is tied to the value of the US Dollar, meaning that the price of Tether won’t deviate from $1.00, with some exceptions of course. A part of its title as a stablecoin also suggests that Tether is less susceptible to to attacks and hacks, however, according to a report from Bitcoin.com, yesterday, Tether was victim to a double spend attack.According to Bitcoin.com:
“By rights, it ought to be impossible to double spend tether, but that’s what happened on June 28 according to one Chinese cybersecurity firm. Someone sent 694 tether to an exchange and was credited for the deposit due to a certain field value pertaining to the transaction being altered.”Moreover:“Tether’s most prominent critics have long asserted that the company doesn’t have enough US dollars in the bank to cover the amount of USDT in circulation. If rampant double spending starts to occur, they’ll be right.” See the full report for yourself, here-https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-in-brief-exchanges-expanding-brave-adds-tor-tether-double-spent/Evidence of the attack can be seen within Omni Explorer- { "amount": "694.00000000", "block": 529555, "blockhash": "00000000000000000004850989c1e8b3846b2e503d2bf8c3f63857a3aec0133d", "blocktime": 1530162531, "confirmations": 178, "divisible": true, "fee": "0.00011036", "ismine": false, "positioninblock": 448, "propertyid": 31, "propertyname": "TetherUS", "referenceaddress": "16sNxzU5qMmeDkV4QcARCivMNknxr9Yx79", "sendingaddress": "17R4MDRYiC29znLdGUo4wz9dwNboWvt2Uy", "txid": "f2e4b555532c6abd9065ab6158a1eec184e4fa8a570e9fb1ede4022589904dd8", "type": "Simple Send", "type_int": 0, "valid": true, "version": 0 }https://api.omniexplorer.info/v1/transaction/tx/f2e4b555532c6abd9065ab6158a1eec184e4fa8a570e9fb1ede4022589904dd8What does this mean?This could be a one off, however as Bitcoin.com stipulate, further attacks of this nature will in turn lead to future problems for the value of Tether and the costs associated with maintaining the currency. The take home message from this then is that even as a stablecoin, Tether might not be so stable after all. Investment Disclaimer