Given Bitfinex is consistently within top ten daily volumes and USDT return to peg shortly after every “crisis”, the market appears to back up the view that most of the mud slinging around Bitfinex and Tether is FUD. I do not know of any other top ten exchange that has made as many contributions to open source and helping progress trustless distributed trading as Bitfinex has. Of course never trust an exchange with your coins long term (move to trustless whenever possible, as you can with EthFinex). In that regard Bitfinex is a major exchange and well worth MaidSafe contacting about listing MaidsafeCoin IMO (Who to PM this listing suggestion to at MaidSafe?).
Not really worth the time delving too much into, but the extremely shadowy organisation Palantir Technologies is behind a competing TrueUSD stable coin. The main problem for them and other US based stable coins is that Tether is the market leader by far, is outside direct US control and makes bypassing onerous US style KYC/AML trivial for the rest of the world that wants to transfer approximate USD Tether about without restrictions. This is unacceptable in some very powerful circles (see Palantir’s client list) , hence the low information content, highly sensationalist twitter bot army and negative press from all the usual mass media sources. Easy to spot FUD : Quickly and consistently shout about all negatives, and never ever (ever!) correct when more facts come along afterwards, such as:
Study Finds No Statistical Correlation Between Tether Issuance and BTC Price Movements