DeFi

Tether’s dominance over Circle has been rising since Solana-based Drift Protocol was exploited for $285 million this month, with decentralized finance users appearing to propel USDT’s market cap to an all-time high on Tuesday following another major hack. Since attackers linked to North Korea pulled off one of DeFi’s largest hacks this year, USDT’s market cap has grown 2.1% to nearly $188 billion, according to CoinGecko. Meanwhile, USDC's total value has increased at a slower pace, rising 1.4%...

Technology

Tether launched a self-custodial digital wallet on Tuesday called Tether.Wallet, offering support not only for its flagship USDT stablecoin and USAT for the U.S. market, but also Bitcoin and its gold-backed token, XAUT. The wallet supports USDT and XAUT across Ethereum and the Polygon, Plasma, and Arbitrum networks. It also supports USAT on Ethereum, as well as Bitcoin both on mainnet and via the Lightning Network. Users can send funds using human-readable Tether names rather than complex walle...

Artificial Intelligence

Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin, USDT, announced the launch of QVAC SDK—a fully open-source software development kit designed to run artificial intelligence applications directly on any device without requiring cloud servers. The cross-platform toolkit works unchanged across iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux environments, the company said. The SDK is built on QVAC Fabric, a fork of llama.cpp, providing compatibility with the llama.cpp model ecosystem for text gen...

Law and Order

The U.S. Treasury Department proposed a rule on Wednesday detailing how stablecoin issuers must build anti-money laundering and sanctions programs under the GENIUS Act, the latest step in implementing the federal framework enacted last year. The proposal, which came from the Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), defines obligations for stablecoin issuers regulated in the U.S., specifically programs, procedures, and technical capa...

Markets

Stablecoins could be used for up to $1.5 quadrillion in annual trading volume by 2035, potentially surpassing traditional payment networks, according to a new Chainalysis report. The blockchain analytics firm projects that even without major catalysts, adjusted stablecoin volume would reach $719 trillion through current growth trajectories alone. But it sees an opportunity for that figure to more than double, based on potential macro shifts. The firm's projections hinge on two transformative sh...

Law and Order

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) revealed proposed rules Monday that would implement stablecoin regulations under the GENIUS Act—which President Donald Trump signed into law last summer—establishing requirements for FDIC-supervised payment stablecoin issuers and banks engaging in stablecoin activities. The proposal creates a prudential framework including standards for reserve assets, redemption processes, capital requirements, and risk management for supervised stablecoin issue...

Coins

Tether announced Tuesday that the USAT stablecoin is expanding to the Celo blockchain, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, marking the regulated digital dollar's first deployment beyond the Ethereum mainnet. The launch will bring USAT—a stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital and targeted at the U.S. market—to Celo, with Google Cloud providing infrastructure support alongside plans for the stablecoin to serve as a gas currency on the layer-2 network. “More than 566 million people globally use US...

Markets

Stablecoin velocity has now doubled in the past two years, with coins changing hands an average of six times per month, Standard Chartered flagged in a note Tuesday morning. That's prompted the bank to revisit a key assumption behind its stablecoin market forecast. Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at the bank, said that's out of sync with the bank's longstanding forecast. Standard Chartered has predicted that the stablecoin market will reach $2 trillion in total market cap...

Markets

Circle shares pared losses on Wednesday after developments surrounding stablecoins on Capitol Hill sent them tumbling a day before alongside rival Tether’s audit announcement. The New York-based stablecoin issuer’s shares changed hands around $102.50, trimming a 22% decrease on the week, according to Yahoo Finance. Not long after the opening bell on Wednesday, Circle’s stock price jumped to $110 before settling lower. Tuesday’s plunge came as crypto lobbyists mulled changes to market structure...

Business

Tether, the world’s top stablecoin issuer, announced Tuesday it will soon make good on a yearslong promise to audit its sprawling stablecoin reserves—but won’t yet disclose which firm will actually do the job. Tether claims to hold some $192 billion in assets in reserve around the world to back the value of its dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDT. The majority of those reserves are purported to be held in U.S. Treasuries. But, ever since its founding in 2014, the company has refrained from undergoin...

Markets

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller thinks that stablecoins are “incredibly useful”—so much so that he expects them to become the backbone of the financial system in the coming decades.  “I assume our whole payments systems will be stablecoins in 10 or 15 years,” he said in a newly posted video interview with Morgan Stanley, calling the fiat-pegged tokens highly productive thanks to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness.  The former hedge fund manager did not speak as highly about the...

Law and Order

Prosecutors for the Massachusetts District of the U.S. Attorney’s Office are seeking the civil forfeiture of $327,829 in USDT as part of a money laundering scheme that victimized the user of an online dating app. An individual operating under the guise of “Linda Brown” communicated with the victim—a Massachusetts resident—for a few weeks beginning in November 2024 before offering a purported cryptocurrency investment opportunity to the individual. The victim then sent funds to wallets controlled...

Business

Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, helped shape Anchorage Digital, a key player in Tether’s efforts to gain a regulated foothold in U.S. markets. Prior to being tapped by Trump for the role on Friday, Warsh served as an advisor to Anchorage Digital for years. The American financier and bank executive was listed on the company’s website as an advisor, but he was removed sometime after Jan. 16, per the Internet Archive. On Friday, Anchorage Digital co-found...

Business

Opera’s aggressive pivot into the crypto space paid off in the markets on Monday, with shares climbing nearly 18% following the integration of Tether’s USDT into its MiniPay wallet. The Oslo-based company saw its stock jump from an opening price of $12.42 to $14.87 earlier Monday after announcing that users can now hold and transfer the world's largest stablecoin, alongside the gold-pegged token Tether Gold. Opera's shares finished the day trading at $14.10, still showing a more than 13% rise on...

Law and Order

Jingliang Su, a Chinese national, was sentenced to 46 months in prison for the role he played in the laundering of more than $36.9 million taken from victims of crypto scams.  Su, who pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to operate an illegal money transmitting business, was also ordered to pay restitution of more than $26.8 million. “This defendant and his co-conspirators scammed 174 Americans out of their hard-earned money,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Dep...

Markets

Roughly $500 billion worth of cash will shift from bank deposits into stablecoins by 2028, estimated Standard Chartered Global Head of Digital Assets Rearch Geoff Kendrick in a note shared with Decrypt. It's a more modest estimate than Kendrick offered up in October, when he wrote that stablecoins could lure $1 trillion away from banks. The report comes as lawmakers in D.C. debate over the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, or CLARITY Act, which would create a federal regulatory framework for dig...

Business

Tether said Tuesday that its USAT stablecoin is now available for trading and will be issued by Anchorage Digital, providing it with a pathway toward compliance under the GENIUS Act. In a press release, the El Salvador-based firm said the stablecoin—which debuted on several crypto exchanges, including Kraken and Crypto.com—was specifically designed for U.S. markets, with Anchorage's status as a federally chartered digital asset bank placing the product under the supervision of the U.S. Office of...

Business

Tether’s legacy was built around the U.S. dollar, but an attestation report published by the stablecoin issuer on Monday underscored a recent shift in momentum toward gold—with the report coming right as gold hit a new all-time high above $5,100. As of Dec. 31, the company had minted 375,000 Tether Gold (XAUT) tokens, a 38% increase compared to three months ago, according to a report from accounting firm BDO Italia. Meanwhile, USDT’s market cap grew 7% to $187 billion, according to CoinGecko. Th...

Long Reads

More than a decade after the first stablecoins emerged, the U.S. dollar still reigns supreme in crypto. The stablecoin market has grown to more than $306 billion in total capitalization, data from DefiLlama shows. According to JPMorgan, around 99% of the stablecoin market remains U.S. dollar‑denominated. USD-pegged stablecoins’ dominance is half inertia and half convenience, according to Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki, CEO of Concordium. “The dollar is the global reserve currency, so it's the natural d...

Law and Order

The FBI announced Friday that it has arrested Ryan James Wedding, a wanted fugitive and former Olympic snowboarder accused of operating a drug-smuggling empire backed by crypto. Wedding, a Canadian national, was accused in 2024 by the U.S. Department of Justice of managing a cocaine trafficking operation running from Colombia, through Mexico, and into the United States. Wedding and his business partners also orchestrated numerous murders as part of that operation, the prosecutors alleged. The DO...