Before finding USDT I had always wonder where one can invest in cryptos and for stable value. Ranked at ~19th in market cap is USDT, a token that is tethered to the US dollar. There is currently over 670 million tokens currently in circulation.
I have heard USDT is great for those who receive altcoins as payments and exchange them to USDT on the same day in order to maintain the current day prices. Even creators of USDT promises the token is backed by the dollar and will always be able to fluidly exchange with the dollar.
However I could not figure out how USDT is able to peg to the dollar when the token is pretty much created out of thin air. coinmarketcap has a link of archived history data that I think is useful to see in how a coin value grows. For USDT just this past August it was listed at a hair shy of 320 million tokens. (I should not take everything coinmarketcap lists as truthful but it has been realiable to me in gagging data on coins.) So in less than four months the tokens in circulation basically doubled!
It is worth mentioning that a lot of stories posted on the token is accusing of the coin for not being transparent as to how they are able to peg to the dollar. Bottom line is more and more people are using the token to retain current value in the for of dollars. The advantage here is by using a token to store value rather than actual dollars users have a way to mitigate their taxes on trade exchanges.