During the bloodbath of March - May 2020, Tether created 4B new USDT. These issuances marked turning points in $BTC - namely, stopping the crash, and pumping prices back up.
It was a coordinated action between Tether and exchanges. A thread.

There’s no way an outside actor would have committed anything of value to crypto at that time - cash, any collateral, or pocket lint. Everyone was panicking and rushing for the exits everywhere.
Tether couldn’t have done it on it’s own. The prints were too huge.

The new liquidity would have dislocated the markets. You know how exchanges are maintaining the value of USDT pegged at 1$, so that the price of Bitcoin is the same everywhere? If $2B of new USDT had hit them in March, they couldn’t have maintained the peg. Yet it has held.

The printing must have been coordinated, and I’d bet good money exchanges convened and decided to form a slush fund for supporting the market. They contributed what they could - shares of their companies, exchange tokens, promises. Backed by this pool, USDTs were issued.

The practice has been around for centuries among banks in times of crisis, before the advent of modern central banking. I don’t think crypto exchanges are any dumber than bankers 90 years ago.
This ought to have elevated Tether to new levels of importance in the crypto ecosystem.