Tether Forgoes Its Blockchain Launch Due to a Crowded Market

• Tether has given up on building and deploying its own blockchain network.
• USDT finds significant usage on existing chains, leaving the company satisfied with how its stablecoin is utilized.

Tether, the company behind the most widely used stablecoin USDT, has ended its plans to launch its own blockchain. The company cited an oversaturated market for deciding against rolling out the network.

The stablecoin issuer’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino, spoke to Bloomberg about halting the plans. “We are very good in technology, but I think blockchains will become almost a commodity in the future,” he said. He feels that deploying another network “might be not the right move” while “very good blockchains” already exist.

As USDT’s $117 billion market capitalization speaks for itself, Ardoino noted that the company is satisfied with being blockchain agnostic. The stablecoin operates over numerous blockchains, including layer-1s like Ethereum and Tron, alongside numerous layer-2 chains, and leveraging their technology to allow users to transact between them. Tron handles about 49% of the USDT in circulation by itself, helping tremendous amounts of users meet transaction and remittance needs. Ardoino maintained that Tether is okay with its stablecoin witnessing usage on other blockchains as long as “it has the highest level of security and sustainability.”

USDT Is Already Massively Used on Popular Blockchains

With hundreds of blockchains out there, only a handful witness considerable usage. The blockchain narrative at the moment revolves around interoperability, high throughput, and low fees—those that offer these features house the largest user base. The exception to this case is Ethereum due to its first mover’s advantage. USDT leverages such chains efficiently. These considerations have kept Tether from deploying another blockchain, especially when its stablecoin observes tremendous usage on existing decentralized ledgers.

Ardoino also said that his company views blockchains as “transport layers” for its main offering. To that end, it recently brought the USDT stablecoin to the Aptos blockchain, a highly scalable network that lets users transact at dirt-cheap fees. Such integrations fall in line with Ardoino’s talks of blockchains being transport layers for the stablecoin as the issuer expands to suitable networks for its use cases.