Craig Sellars, co-founder and CTO of Tether, gave an in-depth interview revealing his vision for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, Bitcoin 2.0 technologies, and the future of blockchain. Sellars is also involved in pioneering projects such as Omni, Factom, Synereo, and MaidSafe, all revolving around the theme of decentralized technology building an internet filled with magical things.
From Bitcoin to Tether: The Birth of a Stablecoin
Sellars recounts discovering Bitcoin in late 2010 after reading a blog about someone investing their life savings into a decentralized digital currency. By late 2013, he noticed structured data hidden in Bitcoin transactions and realized the blockchain could encode immutable representations of digital scarcity. He joined the Mastercoin team, which later evolved into the Omni layer protocol. On top of Omni, Sellars and his team created Tether, a stablecoin pegged to fiat currencies. “Tethers are dollars, euros, or yen. Tether dollars can be sent to and from Bitcoin wallets, acting just like bitcoins,” he explains. Tether Company holds an equivalent amount of fiat in reserve and uses the Omni layer to issue and revoke tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, ensuring the circulating supply matches reserves. Use cases include transferring funds between exchanges (e.g., Bitfinex), online shopping via ShapeShift, hedging against Bitcoin volatility, or simply holding dollars in a multisig wallet.
Multi-Project Ecosystem and the 'Magic Ledger'
Sellars serves as an advisor to several blockchain projects: MaidSafe (decentralizing the internet), Factom (timestamping the universe), Synereo (transforming cryptographic addresses into message-passing neurons), Tauchain (a self-building logic-verifying blockchain), and Fuzo (putting crypto on SIM cards). He sees a common thread: immutably recording digital scarcity on a massively secure state machine. Regarding Omni, Sellars calls it “the blockchain’s coolest secret” – a meta-protocol atop Bitcoin that provides a hard-wired smart contract rule set. The recent release of Omni core 0.0.10 introduced on-chain dynamic feature activation (updating parsing rules without a software upgrade) and paves the way for a decentralized exchange (DEX) where Bitcoin can be traded for Omni native tokens and other assets like Tether currencies, MaidSafeCoin, and Synereo AMPs. “It’s a magic ledger,” Sellars says.
Industry Challenges and Future Outlook
While highly optimistic about the technology, Sellars urges more collaboration among crypto companies. He emphasizes that security, usability, and ease of use are critical for consumer-facing ventures. On the block size debate, he characterizes it as a contest between “how much can we cram in” and “how cheap can we keep it,” warning that transaction volume growth could lead to slow confirmations. Regarding political backlash against encryption and digital currencies, Sellars asserts: “Freedom of speech encompasses seemingly random sequences of characters that mean what only I say they mean. Stopping math is impossible.” Looking ahead, Tether and Omni aim to enable “whatever you can imagine using money and scarce digital objects on a magic ledger.” The interview underscores Sellars’ belief that blockchain technology holds transformative potential beyond mere payments, serving as a foundational layer for programmable value and decentralized exchange.