The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is…
I don't understand how you bodge a stable coin startup. Surely you just mint the tokens in exchange for dollars, and then put ~50% of the dollars in zero risk investments (some form of treasury bonds), and then take the 0.5-1% interest per year as your revenue. Tether currently has $81b marketcap so you could be making $400-800m per year doing basically nothing?
Tether have a great business model but seem to spend 90% of their time falsifying reserves instead. It certainly gives the impression they're planning on taking the capital rather than interest. They're already in breach of the NYAG agreement, with three+ more cases pending.
It actually seems like a great project for e.g. Fidelity or Vanguard to set up a mutual fund that doesn't pay interest. With the name recognition it would be immediate #1 stablecoin assuming they offered the same level of audit scrutiny and reserves breakdown as their other products (i.e. 100x anything offered in the cryptocurrency space currently).