Even if the most extreme hypothesis of Tether being a scam backed by nothing turned out to be true and it crashed to $0, at this stage, I doubt that it would have any impact on the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem because:

- Some crypto exchanges don't even support USDT, instead, they use their own units to represent Dollars, Euros or other national currencies which they hold in their own independent reserves. USDT is not as important as it seems. In many cases, BTC is priced against real reserves sitting on various exchanges. Not to mention alternative stablecoins like USDC, BUSD and others.

- BTC is the most common base currency for trading against most altcoins. The value of most altcoins is expressed relative to BTC, not USDT and the value of BTC is mostly expressed relative to native USD on various exchanges.

- Everyone is already aware of potential issues with Tether. If it turned out to be a scam, it would have no effect on the level of confidence in the rest of the crypto ecosystem.

Even if all past Bitcoin pumps had been artificially caused by fake Tether printing, the collapse of Tether would not materially cause a crash in Bitcoin today - This is in part because, if USDT was to collapse, most exchanges would switch to a different definition of USD (they could switch to USDC instead or use their own native fiat representation as many other exchanges are already doing) and so it would not affect the fiat price of any crypto. Only Tether investors would lose their holdings.

Even if Tether had played a part in increasing Bitcoins' exposure, the Bitcoin brand has already propagated itself into the minds of billions of people around the world and that brand awareness has acquired value which cannot be destroyed.