However three years on, crypto still does not have a "killer app" and is 99.99% used for speculation. Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold".
But in the depths of the March panic, Tether jumped the shark in order to backstop the entire crypto ecosystem, and they can never put that genie back in the bottle. Much like the Fed who cannot stop monetizing US deficits for fear of letting yields explode, the Tetheral Reserve must continue to print USDT in order to support prices. Exchanges cannot let this fail since the vast majority do not have access to the bonafide banking system and thus scrappy users must devise "fiat onramps".
There are many theories about why, the predominant one being that iFinex know they are screwed, and are making one last cash grab before presumably disappearing. This sounds fairly reasonable if the entire operation is indeed a sham, but it means there is effectively no upper bound to BTC prices because the denominator in 90% of the market (USDT) is effectively zero.
Tether has become too big to fail. Bitcoin now finds itself a high tech manifestation of the very thing that Satoshi sought to address.