Claiming they had lost money as a result, the plaintiffs alleged in a complaint last October that over five years Tether issued as much as $3 billion-worth of unbacked USDT tokens, which Bitfinex then used to purchase cryptocurrencies on the open market to prop prices up during market downturns.
Per the complaint, this allegedly caused the total market cap of cryptocurrencies to skyrocket to $795 billion in late 2017.