 After 50 years, Big Bird is finally retiring, a graceful dignified exit for a much beloved figure. One bird that may never retire, nor act dignified, is the albatross around the crypto market's neck, Tether. Well, this week, Tether became untethered, but the question is, will it rise from the ashes like a phoenix, or just get mad and call everyone a horse face? So this week, Binance in Uganda, Bitcoin goes off-grid, and Mike Novigratz says no to the rally this year. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's Hodler's Digest. If coin market cap was a murder mystery, a crypto who'd done it, if you will, Tether would be the prime suspect. Nobody knows the location, the weapon, or the method, yet they are sure of the murderer. It was the stablecoin. But is this so-called stablecoin really guilty of everything it is accused of? Or is it the most control crypto, actually the most misunderstood? Market manipulation rumors aside, what makes Tether so controversial is the suspicion that its billions of token issuances are not actually backed by dollar reserves as they claim. Rumors supported by Tether's sudden break with their auditor earlier this year. Although an unofficial audit conducted later attempted to assuage the public of Tether's honesty, it did little to assuage its critics. One of whom is so fiery that he's actually been sued by Bitfinex in exchange connected with Tether for his brutal Tether burns on Twitter. Now, this week, in yet another of a series of bad news for the stablecoin, Tether appeared to become untethered in what we call the Great Unpegging. On Monday, it dropped to as low as 95 cents, prompting speculations of a bank run. Elsewhere on Twitter, people had their fun at Tether's expense, perhaps most notably Binance CEO CZ. There were even a few contrarians out there that saw the Great Unpegging as a good thing. And finally, the Winkle vibe with a thought-provoking take on the whole debacle. We spoke to Tony Bayes to give us his take on Tether Untethered. It's a good reminder to people not to get complacent and not to assume that everything is fine. You're always supposed to understand that holding Tether comes with gigantic risks. I honestly think that Tether should never trade more than 95 cents on the dollar, maybe even 90 cents on the dollar. I think holding Tether is very risky and a reminder like this every three to six months is very healthy for the market because it reminds people how unstable these stable coins are. A lot of people misunderstood the Tether panic into Bitcoin for genuine demand for Bitcoin and reversal of the bear market. I disagree with that view. I think this is just a temporary migration of capital because people were not interested in holding Bitcoin because of the bear market. But the asset they were sitting in became more risky than Bitcoin. I think that once this settles down, people will go back to the position that they had before. I don't see this news reversing the bear market. I still think that the road, the rest of the shear is going to be a little bit harder, but eventually we will bottom out and prices will reverse. If you are not a fan of the stablecoin or Bitfinex, you might want to check out this medium page. It's a blog dedicated entirely to uncovering alleged fraud committed by Tether and Bitfinex. Check it out purely for the simple reason that Bitfinex tried to sue it out of existence. Next up in this news roundup, investment firm Fidelity. Fidelity launched Fidelity Digital Assets this week, a pretty important development in the crypto world even if it's not the jazziest news item of the week. Burying through the jargon, the press release notes that Fidelity Digital Assets will offer enterprise quality custody and trade execution services for digital assets. The CEO of this new venture believes part of their mission is making Bitcoin more accessible to investors. However, Fidelity Digital Assets is only available to institutional investors for now, aiming to provide them with, heads up, more jargon, a secure, compliant and institutional grade omnibus storage solution for Bitcoin, ETH, and other digital assets. Fidelity is hoping that their pretty substantial Wall Street credentials and over $7.2 trillion in client assets will encourage big institutions to finally hop on over to the crypto space. And Fidelity Digital Assets head Tom Jessup has promised to leverage all of the resources of a big organization in order to do so. According to research cited by Fidelity, about 70% of institutional finance executives believe crypto will eventually play a role in the financial sector. But many remain sitting on the sidelines. Jessup and Fidelity hope to change that. Back in June, finance founder CZ told CoinTelegraph in an exclusive interview about plans to set up shop in Uganda. And this week, CZ's wish came true. And the largest international exchange launched a fiat-toed crypto exchange in Africa. If you are a Ugandan interested in crypto, you can now deposit and withdraw Ugandan shillings with Binance Uganda. Currently, it is only possible to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum for fiat, but expect more cryptos to be added in the future. Earlier this year, the bank had gone to issue a warning to its clients about risk surrounding crypto. However, the government is looking into blockchain, in spite of its pretty close relationship to the evils of crypto, as a way to tackle inefficiencies in the public sector. In a Medium post, Binance talked about how this foray into Uganda was an educational venture as much as a business one. Their CFO believes the exchange in Uganda will bring more innovations to the region. Uganda itself is actually a very, I would say, typical or quite representative of sort of the trend that we're seeing in Africa. About 60 to 70 million people, predominantly demographics quite young, very technology-savvy information is actually quite transparent. Actually, we're firm believers in that through blockchain technology and through cryptocurrency, we can actually help to drive sustainable development in Africa. The value added to the average Uganda is basically, you know, we are delivering the freedom of money and the freedom of investment to them. So we are hiring in Africa. We're hiring, we're looking for investment partners to join our labs team. We're looking for, we're hiring in Uganda for operational people there. So I think we'll want to get that message up. While Bitcoin won't, Nouriel is doing a hard fork by increasing his block size. After a sign of hearing in which he called crypto both the mother and father of all scams, it's safe to say that economist Nouriel Rubini is off most Hodler's Christmas card list. Crypto is the mother or father of all scams and bubbles. And yet, for a man so open to debate, he seems to have blocked an awful lot of people on Twitter. So much so that the hashtag blocked by Nouriel has become a badge of honor amongst the great and the good of the crypto Twitterverse. To be fair, being open to debate is one thing, but having to fend off mean tweets by the truckload is something else. Some of those featured on the hashtag blocked by Nouriel list are quite high profile. Roger Ver, for example. And Eric Voorhees was positively ecstatic about it. Rubini has inducted all of his critics. He has fired back at some. Although, fortunately for us, sometimes misfiring, like this exchange with Ari Paul, in which the economist mischaracterized an old interview that Ari Paul had given about a 50k price prediction. Paul accused Rubini of not even watching the video he linked to in his tweet. Professor Rubini, please do your homework next time. Tim Draper, Tom Lee, and Mike Novikratz are so famous for their prediction, they could star as the three witches in an off-Broadway production of Macbeth. But unlike those three witches, they tend to differ wildly in their respective prophecies. Michael Novikratz, one of the three seers, was more cautious in his predictions this week. I don't see us, meaning Bitcoin, breaking $10,000 by the end of the year. But don't worry, this bull isn't becoming a barrel of a sudden. He still thinks the 2019 has the possibility to see big institutions getting into crypto. And he's putting his money where his mouth is too. Galaxy investment partners will become one of the first clients of Fidelity's new digital asset service, which aims to bring crypto accessibility to institutional investors. Tom Lee, on the other hand, remains bullish as ever, sticking to his prediction of Bitcoin to hit $25k by the end of the year. Everyone entering into the crypto space is essentially entering into the wild west. But not everyone actually goes off-grid and into the wild. Earlier this year, we reported on the developer Daniel Jones, who claimed to have successfully completed a solar-powered off-grid crypto transaction using just shortwave radio and blockchain. Last weekend, another developer achieved an equally, if not more badass task by sending Bitcoin 12.6km away without a cell phone network or an internet connection. Impossible, you say? Well, we spoke to the guy behind this Barogrill's level of crypto trading. I'm trying to demonstrate that it can work and just how powerful it is. But where I see the real value at the moment is either in situations where censorship resistance is an important feature. So whether it's in a war zone, maybe in a prison or something like that, where you're not able to get access to a cellular network for whatever reason, something like Gotenar is an easy-deploy solution to be able to get from where you are to some internet. Another one is a disaster zone where, or perhaps a remote location where the infrastructure has been destroyed or doesn't exist. Here is some further reading and watching to see you out the rest of your Sunday. Not satisfied with trying to take down crypto, Rubini puts blockchain in his crosshairs. And in case you didn't already know, Roger Ver really, really, really doesn't like government. And I mean really. And as always, like, subscribe, and hodl. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe, and hodl.