In an urgent announcement, Tether claims to have been hacked by an external attacker who removed over $30 million worth of USDT from the Tether Treasury wallet. They have since released an update to the Omni Core software, which will prevent the funds from leaving the attacker's address, making it a temporary hard fork according to the company. Tether is urging all of its users to install the update, which can be found here. This is critical, since the USDT coming from the address will not be redeemable, and the update should prevent the stolen tethers from entering your wallet. Exchanges that support Tether are updating as well, making USDT funding temporarily unavailable on many of them.

The hack comes at a particularly inopportune time of controversy surrounding Tether and Bitfinex in the crypto community. As expected, multiple theories concerning the hack's nature are beginning to circulate, including inside job theories. Interestingly enough, Tether implicitly responded to critics in the hack announcement itself, claiming that it is continuing to back each tether in its reserve. The story is still developing, and we will keep you updated once more facts become available.