Nominally this is not really related to Chia, but because the only real way to convert your block rewards into rent money right now is generally through Tether (USDT), this has the potential to be fairly impactful on the price of XCH as well as the cryptocurrency ecosystem in general.
Bloomberg is reporting that executives for Tether Inc are now facing a criminal investigation into allegations of bank fraud by the US Department of Justice. This is incredibly serious, and as the article indicates the latest in a long line of troubles with the law. This story is just developing and there are not even any comments from US Justice Department officials yet.
The allegations are that when Tether was starting out they concealed from their banks that they were trading cryptocurrencies with their deposits, a big no-no when dealing with big banks. The article goes into some more detail, and is worth a read but I’m sure we haven’t heard the end of this one.