Tether (USDT)

0 standards supported

Key details

Parent: CEO Paolo Ardoino
Launch: 2014

Overview

Tether (USDT) is the world's largest stablecoin by market capitalization and a US-dollar-pegged token issued across many blockchains (Ethereum/ERC-20, Tron/TRC-20, Solana and others) [1, 2, global-cro]. It is the dominant settlement and trading-pair asset across crypto exchanges and a key on/off-ramp proxy for the US dollar in many markets.

History

2014 — launched as Realcoin by Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins and Craig Sellars, soon rebranded Tether (USDT). 2015–2017 — adopted as a base trading pair across exchanges, closely associated with Bitfinex. 2019–2021 — settles with the New York Attorney General and the US CFTC over reserve-disclosure and reporting issues, agreeing to fines and periodic reserve attestations. 2022–2024 — maintains its peg through market stress and grows reserves heavily into US Treasuries, reporting large profits. 2024–2025 — relocates headquarters to El Salvador under its digital-asset framework and remains the largest stablecoin by far.

Ownership & operator

Operating entity: Tether Holdings Limited (now headquartered in El Salvador; historically British Virgin Islands). Major shareholders: the same ownership group behind Bitfinex/iFinex (privately held; limited public disclosure), led by CEO Paolo Ardoino. Regulators: El Salvador digital-asset licensing; prior US NYAG and CFTC settlements; not authorized as an EU MiCA e-money token issuer.

Technical integration

USDT is issued as tokens on multiple chains, primarily Ethereum (ERC-20) and Tron (TRC-20), plus Solana, Avalanche and others, transferred via standard crypto wallet addresses. There is no consumer wallet app; USDT is held in third-party wallets and exchanges and used for trading, remittances and dollar-proxy savings.

Implementations & partners

Major competitors: [[circle]] (USDC issuer) and other stablecoin issuers; integrated across virtually all major exchanges including [[binance]], [[coinbase]] and [[kraken]].

Status

Active, the dominant global stablecoin and a core piece of crypto market infrastructure [1, 2].

Sources

1 Tether — official
2 Tether — Wikipedia
global-cro In-corpus: reports/countries/US-united-states.md

Source

Biography extracted from tether.md. See matrix.md for standards-support matrix if present.