Tether Operations Limited (Tether), the blockchain-enabled platform that powers the largest stablecoin by market capitalisation, has surpassed USD50 billion in market capitalisation as the pre-eminent stablecoin paves the way to power a new digital economy and future alternative financial system.
USDt is making waves beyond its native digital token space as the wider financial system recognises the monumental technological advance that the pre-eminent stablecoin represents. As the most liquid, stable and trusted stablecoin, USDt offers a faster, cheaper and more intuitive modern form of money.
USDt’s exponential growth – which has seen its market capitalisation grow by more than a factor of ten over the past 12 months – has left the stablecoin eclipsing major blue chip stocks such as Ford Motor and Kraft Heinz.
The mushrooming market capitalisation of USDt is mirrored by its variety of different use cases. The tetherisation of trading continues to gather pace with spot exchanges denominating trading pairs in USDt rather than bitcoin. Meanwhile, USDt is increasingly used in payments and remittances and plays a pivotal role as a liquidity provider in the nascent field of decentralised finance (DeFi). Tether’s daily trading volume now exceeds USD140 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.
“Crossing a market cap of USD50 billion represents an incredibly important milestone for Tether,” says Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Tether. “When the group of visionaries that created Tether in 2014 first launched the stablecoin they could not have dreamt that it would have grown so exponentially. Tether’s success is a blueprint for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and a banking system of the future. We are truly humbled by the pivotal role that Tether now plays in the digital token ecosystem across myriad protocols and applications.”
Institutional and corporate usage form the lion share of demand for USDt, with USD29 billion added since 1 January, 2021, a gain that is greater than the combined market capitalisation of all rival stablecoins, combined.
USDt’s presence in the e-commerce and payments space is growing. USDt represents a superior medium of exchange in many use cases, and can offer lower transaction fees than wire transfers of fiat currency. USDt is supported by numerous e-commerce platforms and payment gateways, and already provides faster payment as compared to credit cards and traditional payment systems.
USDt works across a diversity of different blockchains, including Algorand, bitcoin cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni, Tron and Solana.
