Depends what you mean by “holding” USD. Is it under your mattress? Or in a bank? Is it a bank in Venezuela or Lebanon?
Holding USDT is kind of holding USD. You just have Tether in the middle.
Main utility (value?) of stablecoins is to “bridge” USD fiat into crypto though.
Interestingly, crypto.com (exchange) keeps a “USD” balance for its customers, which is separate from its USDT balance. You can deposit/withdraw to/from your “USD” balance via fiat (bank transfer) or a basket of stablecoins like USDC, BUSD etc. Binance does this as well, and FTX before. They all kept USDT separate though. Worth considering why this is the case.
> They all kept USDT separate though. Worth considering why this is the case.
Because they’re not dollars, it’s a token that is supposed to be pegged to a dollar. It’s not a dollar until you redeem it for an actual dollar. In that respect it’s the same as USDC.
Disclaimer: I cannot tell you whether Tether is actually backed by anything. I cannot tell you everything listed is always a good thing for the user or for society at large. These are broad points and may not apply to particular jurisdictions, banks, cases etc.
* You don't need multiple bank accounts in multiple countries with multiple banks requiring multiple onboarding, KYC and ongoing fees and management.
* It's faster and cheaper to move around than USD via banks (and near zero chance of a transfer failing because of KYC etc).
* All payments are (short of government action) final, you can be confident you have actually been irrevocably paid if you get tether. Your bank may reverse a transfer at will...
* It's actually more versatile within Crypto as many places in crypto prefer not to use USD itself.
* You can hold and transfer tether with basically no access to USD itself, the global financial system etc. So if you live in a place with very tight controls on capital (eg China or Zimbabwe). (I personally think this is a very under appreciated property of crypto for those of us in free, stable currencied nations)
* It's much harder to trace you as the owner (if used correctly, big if).
You did not _really_ "wire money to someone in <1h".
Your bank signaled its willingness to move money to an other bank, who is in turn trusting enough of your bank to preemptively display that money as "received" while the actual settlement will happen the next day.
Modern, traditional, banking and brokerage is not based on actual fund transfer, but on the layering of trust relationships and complicated settlement state machines to give the impression of instantaneous transfers.
All operations done on money "just received" is done on margin, though at 0 cost.
What you say is generally true for standard cross-border payments, however two financial institutions in a single market should be able to execute a fully settled deal in less than an hour, RTGS (real-time gross settlement) systems are one of the available options in pretty much every market. Fedwire in USA, Target2 across EU countries and other systems elsewhere will not use some layering of correspondent banks and settling cover payments/fees after some business days, it will be a fully settled transaction pretty much immediately.
Something to note is that the Fed is shaking out FedNow instant payments, and they go GA mid 2023. This is instant settlement of amounts up to $25k per transaction, ramping to $100k over time. It should be expected that FedWire persists (with somewhat slower settlement times) for greater amounts. It costs the bank a few cents per transaction (the service runs on a cost recovery model), but it’s expected this cost won’t be passed along to the customer due to cost savings over checks and ACH.
In Australia our RTGS is called RITS (Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System) and settlement is generally instant[1]. It's relatively new (2018) but it is pretty amazing.
Even before this our system wasn't too slow - I can barely remember but I think transactions were mostly always settled in a single business day. When I lived in the US (2013-2015) I was really surprised by how painful and slow it was to do a lot of basic banking stuff.
I just transferred some USDC on the algorand network. It took 4 seconds for the transfer to complete, it cost me less than $0.01 in transaction fees, funds were instantly available to spend in the other account, and nobody called me to ask why I was moving my own money.
> I literally just wired someone money today and it was <1 hour.
I can't count how many times I've had to explain to people that domestic wire transfers are actually really, really fast. Even international wire transfers occur relatively quickly in my experience, though obviously I can't vouch for every country:country combination.
I get the impression that a lot of Tether/crypto proponents have never actually dealt with normal banking at scale, they've only heard about it through exaggerated depictions designed to make crypto look like the better option.
Don't get me wrong: There are a lot of areas where normal banking is imperfect and can improve! However, replacing it with an unregulated asset operated by a shady company that has been proven to have been lying about their reserves once already is not an improvement.
Also, you don't need Tether specifically to transfer crypto around quickly. Most people would just transfer their crypto directly. It wouldn't make any sense to convert your Bitcoin to Tether to transfer to another exchange just to convert it back to Bitcoin and pay exchange fees on both ends.
International wire transfers take from 1 to 5 working days to complete. Sometimes more when the receiving bank requires additional documentation or refuses the transfer. They also cost a lot more (~50$ per transfer) and sometimes require a physical visit to a bank branch.
