Buy Tether

Tether is the original stablecoin and still the largest by a considerable margin. One USDT is designed to be worth one US dollar, always. No price appreciation thesis. No technology pitch. No decentralisation ideology. Just a digital dollar that moves on blockchain rails.

Tether Limited launched USDT in 2014, originally on Bitcoin's Omni Layer. It has since expanded to Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Avalanche, and several other networks. Simple concept: for every USDT in circulation, Tether claims to hold equivalent reserves. Hand over dollars, they mint USDT. Return USDT, they burn it and hand back dollars. Market arbitrage and this redeemability promise keep the peg intact.

Practical uses are everywhere. Traders park funds between positions without converting to fiat (which costs fees and takes time). Businesses in countries with volatile currencies hold USDT as a stable store of value. Cross-border payments settle in minutes, not days. Remittance corridors with expensive or slow traditional banking have seen genuine adoption. DeFi protocols use it as base-pair collateral throughout their operations.

Now for the part that matters most: trust and reserves. Questions about Tether's backing have persisted since at least 2017. The CFTC fined them $41 million in 2021 for misrepresenting reserves. For years, full dollar backing was claimed while reality included commercial paper, loans, and other assets. Since then, a shift toward US Treasury bills as the dominant reserve has occurred, and quarterly attestation reports from BDO Italia are now published. As of early 2025, reported assets exceed $100 billion, primarily in T-bills.

Critical distinction: an attestation is not an audit. Audits examine processes, controls, and historical records. Attestations confirm a snapshot at a single point in time. Despite years of promises, Tether has never completed a full public audit. That doesn't prove the reserves are absent. But it means you're placing trust in the company's word and a limited verification process.

Depeg risk is real but historically brief. During the May 2022 Terra/LUNA collapse, USDT dropped to $0.95 as panic selling hit all stablecoins. Recovery took days. Smaller deviations from $1.00 have occurred in other stress periods, typically resolving within hours as arbitrageurs buy the discount.

Despite every controversy, USDT's dominance is hard to dispute. Trading volume regularly exceeds Bitcoin's on most days. Market capitalisation has surpassed $140 billion, placing it third overall among all cryptocurrencies. Network effects are self-reinforcing: traders use USDT because everyone else does, creating liquidity that alternatives can't match.

Regulatory pressure keeps building. The EU's MiCA regulation, fully effective since 2024, imposed stablecoin requirements that led some exchanges to delist USDT for European users. Tether has responded with compliance efforts, but the regulatory picture stays uneven across jurisdictions.

Buying USDT through Banxa works like any other supported coin. Select USDT, choose your preferred network (Ethereum and Tron are most common), enter your amount, pick a payment method, and provide your wallet address. Most orders settle within minutes. Banxa is publicly listed and licensed in multiple jurisdictions with full KYC and AML compliance.

USDT aims to hold a $1 peg but this is not guaranteed. Reserve backing depends on Tether Limited's financial health and transparency. This is not financial advice.