The stablecoin publisher Tether is notorious for its often vague way of working. For example, it was unclear for a long time what exactly USDT’s collateral was until the US government forced the company to do so in late 2022. Now the company continues to cause uncertainty. Instead of the collateral, it’s about the support of USDT on the Tron (TRX) blockchain.
Vague Tether policy for Tron
Last Tuesday, Circle announced that it had stopped mining USD Coin (USDC) on Tron. It is not entirely clear why the stablecoin company chooses to do this. All we know is that Circle is trying to ensure that USDC remains trustworthy. The stop takes effect immediately, but existing coins on Tron can still be postponed until February 2025.
Tether indicated to Cointelegraph on Thursday that it itself was not ruling out such a move. “Tethers tokens have been issued on various blockchains, which merely serve as transport layers for such tokens.” Tether retains the ability to freeze transactions on any directly supported blockchain to comply with regulations. In any case, Tether monitors the security of each supported network,” the stablecoin issuer said.
Tether is currently the largest stablecoin issuer in the entire crypto market. With a market value of almost $98 billion, USDT is by far the largest stablecoin and even the third largest cryptocurrency in the industry. The next largest stablecoin is USDC, although it is significantly smaller at almost $28 billion.
Tron is popular with terrorists
The Tron network hosts nearly 52 billion USDT, which represents more than half of the nearly 101 billion USDT tokens issued on multiple blockchains. This is even more than the USDT supply on Ethereum (ETH), which is only 45 billion USDT.
In any case, the Tron network seems to be quite popular. Last year, Tether prepared a $1 billion Ethereum to Tron chain swap, which may have been an indicator of its popularity.
Just like Tether, Tron has been in the headlines a lot lately with negative news. Last year, for example, Tron turned out to be very popular among terrorist organizations that need to move their money in unprecedented ways. USDT is considered the most popular asset on the network.