In a surprise tweet, just a day after a $1.4T class-action lawsuit against Tether, a director at VanEck has come out in support of the controversial company. “Protection innovation!” he writes.

Gabor Gurbacs is a digital assets strategist and director at Van Eck, a large investment management firm that has some $49B in assets under management. You may also know VanEck, together with SolidX, as two firms that were leading the charge for a Bitcoin ETF. Now, Gurbacs has come out strongly in support of Tether to the surprise of almost everyone.

“I am tired of hoodwink academics, hype-media and uninformed lawyers discrediting the hard work & structural innovation that Tether and Bitfinex built!” he wrote to the cryptocurrency community on Twitter. The reaction has been nothing short of explosive, with many baffled as to why such a shady company deserves such strong support. The co-founder of Tether even admitted that it ‘does not matter’ if USDT is backed by anything.

When pressed on why he supports Tether, Gurbacs lists his reasons. For him, it’s because Tether improved on the structure of the entire cryptocurrency market by making USD tokenized and liquid. As he writes below:

However, Olta Andoni, attorney at Ziliak Law, fired back in his mentions, arguing that Tether also promised “audits and transparency” in its whitepaper. Thus far, none of this has taken place. There’s arguably “nothing innovative here,” she writes, just fraud which has gone on for too long. The conversation was abruptly ended by Gurbacs.

Others were confused as to why such a high-ranking person in a firm like VanEck would come out so strongly in support of Tether:

The comments come just a day after a class-action lawsuit was filed by Roche Freedman LLP, alleging that Tether caused more than $1.4T in damages. The lawsuit also claims that USDT has been artificially inflating Bitcoin’s price by effectively printing money out of nothing.

Overall, it should go without saying that, if you believe in Bitcoin, you probably also believe in ‘sound money.’ Tether, by all estimates, seems to be an anathema to this idea and makes Gurbacs’s comments that much more shocking.

Where do you stand on the Tether debate? Let us know your thoughts below in the comments.