Trump’s Commerce secretary pick is a crypto booster with ties to one of the industry’s most controversial players

Trump’s Commerce secretary pick backed a crypto company that can’t seem to stay out of trouble

Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald CEO who’s been tapped to run the US Commerce Department, has in recent years become a prominent cheerleader for Tether, the company behind one of the world’s biggest crypto assets. But even by the standards of crypto — an alternative financial ecosystem in which some of the biggest frauds of the 21st century have taken place — Tether is a murky entity that has been dogged by investors’ concerns about its operations. It is effectively an unregulated, offshore bank that’s become a tent pole of the $3 trillion crypto industry. The way it works, briefly: You give a buck to Tether and it gives you a digital token, the lowercase-T tether, that essentially functions as a digital US dollar in the crypto-verse. The tether token is known as a stablecoin, a kind of crypto that was created to hold its value steady while others, like bitcoin and ether, swing wildly minute to minute. (Yes, even though they’re called crypto-currencies, they’re actually a garbage way to buy things.) While there’s a lot to say about the risks of tether, let’s focus for a moment the capital-T company that issues it and its No. 1 banker in the US, Lutnick. Tether was founded a decade ago by Brock Pierce, a former child actor of “The Mighty Ducks” fame, and a former plastic surgeon named Giancarlo Devasini. The company is now one of the biggest players in crypto, with a daily trading volume that eclipses even bitcoin, the world’s most popular token. And like many companies in the largely unregulated space, it has come under regulatory and legal scrutiny.