How USDT holds its peg

USDT is the largest stablecoin, and it has no blockchain of its own. Half of it lives on TRON, most of the rest on Ethereum. Tether issues it when dollars arrive and takes it back when they leave; each transfer is only as final as the chain it happens on.

Read how it works

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Supply changes and Ethereum blocks

    USDT tokens dollars, into and out of the reserve tokens leaving circulation a chain's ledger flashes as it settles USDT reserve: T-bills, repo, gold, loans, bitcoin, other
    Supply by chain Reading supplies…
    How this is read

    Circulating supply on each of the 13 chains Tether issues on, read from public nodes every 30 to 60 seconds. On most chains that is the on-chain total minus the balance of Tether's treasury wallet, which holds tokens authorized but not issued. On Solana, Polkadot Asset Hub and Liquid the treasury couldn't be identified, so the raw total is shown and is higher than Tether's own figure. Use the arrow keys to read each row.

    USDT supply on each chain
    ChainSupplyShareRead at
    Minted and burned
    • minted, up
    • burned, down

    Use the left and right arrow keys to read each column. In live mode each column is one minute and shows the net change in circulating supply between two readings of each chain, which is mostly Tether's treasury paying out or taking tokens back, not new minting. There is no history from before you connected.

    USDT into and out of circulation in each recent period
    PeriodMintedBurnedNet
    What just happened (illustrative) 0 USDT in circulation 0 in reserve 0 minted 0 burned 0 chains shown

      The parts that make this work

      What USDT is, and isn't

      USDT, or Tether USD, is a token that Tether promises to redeem for one US dollar. It isn't a blockchain: it has no validators and no consensus of its own. It exists as a token contract or issued asset on 13 chains Tether currently issues on: TRON, Ethereum, Solana, TON, Aptos, Avalanche, Kaia, Celo, Kava (listed by Tether as Cosmos), NEAR, Polkadot Asset Hub, Liquid and Tezos. On September 29, 2026, Tether's transparency data showed about 92.5 B in circulation on TRON and 86.6 B on Ethereum, together over 97 % of the total; Solana came third with 2.7 B.

      Tether first issued USDT in 2014, on the Omni Layer on top of Bitcoin. It stopped minting on Omni, Kusama and Bitcoin Cash SLP in 2023 and on EOS and Algorand in 2024, and stopped accepting redemptions on all five on September 1, 2025. The issuer, Tether International, S.A. de C.V., is incorporated in El Salvador, where Tether announced its move in January 2025 after receiving a licence as a digital asset service provider. Paolo Ardoino has been chief executive since December 2023.

      Authorized, issued and in circulation

      Tether doesn't mint when a customer pays. It mints ahead of time into a treasury wallet on each chain, as inventory for future requests and for customers changing chains; on TRON it minted 3 B that way on August 21, 2026, in three blocks of 1 B. Tokens in the treasury are "authorized but not issued": they exist on-chain, but Tether doesn't count them as liabilities and nothing backs them. They become issued, and backed, when the treasury sends them to a customer.

      That makes "supply" two numbers. On September 29, 2026, Tether's transparency data listed about 193.6 B USDT authorized across all chains, of which 9.7 B sat unissued in its treasuries, leaving 183.9 B in circulation. This page uses the circulating figure. A chain's raw on-chain total, which block explorers show, can be much higher: on NEAR, for example, 489 M of the 526 M on-chain were still in the treasury.

      Buying and redeeming

      Only verified customers deal with Tether directly. They pass identity checks, pay a US$150 verification fee, and buy or redeem at least $100,000 at a time. Tether charges 0.1 % to issue and the greater of 0.1 % or $1,000 to redeem. Everyone else gets USDT from those customers: exchanges, trading firms and payment apps. If USDT trades below a dollar, a verified customer can buy it cheaply and redeem it with Tether at par, and that arbitrage is what holds the price near $1.

      What backs each token, compared with USDC

      Tether publishes a Financial Figures and Reserves Report every quarter, with an assurance report from BDO Advisory Services in Milan that checks the figures as of one moment. On June 30, 2026 it reported reserves of $187,751,426,411 against $183,622,105,630 of issued tokens, so assets exceeded liabilities by $4,109,529,196. In August 2026 Tether announced that KPMG had issued an unqualified audit opinion on its financial statements for 2025, its first audit by a Big Four firm; the full statements weren't published.

      Tether reserves, June 30, 2026
      Held inUS dollars
      US Treasury bills, under 90 days on average114,960,963,604
      Reverse repo backed by Treasuries, overnight and term25,618,981,362
      Gold bars18,838,357,171
      Secured loans13,453,749,726
      Bitcoin5,801,630,681
      Other investments5,244,911,675
      Public equities3,761,438,892
      Cash, non-US Treasury bills and corporate bonds71,393,300
      Total reserves187,751,426,411

      The contrast with USDC is in the last five rows. Circle's reserve at the end of August 2026 was only cash, overnight Treasury repo and short Treasury bills, mostly inside a government money market fund, examined monthly. Tether's was about 75 % in the same kinds of assets and 25 % in things whose value moves or depends on a borrower: gold (10 %), secured loans (7 %), bitcoin (3 %) and other investments and shares (5 %). Gold and bitcoin are valued at market prices, so the cushion of reserves over liabilities moves with them; it was $6.3 B at the end of 2025 and $4.1 B at the end of June 2026. The GENIUS Act's list of reserve assets for US payment stablecoins doesn't include gold, bitcoin or loans.

      Figures as reported, not live: the report is quarterly and describes one moment. Source: Tether Financial Figures and Reserves Report, June 30, 2026, with BDO's assurance report (PDF, signed July 31, 2026).

      A transfer is only as final as its chain

      Tether takes no part in an ordinary transfer. Half of all USDT sits on TRON, a proof-of-stake chain without a page on this site, where 27 elected "super representatives" take turns producing a block every three seconds. On Ethereum a transfer is final after about two epochs of validator attestations; on Solana when the slot is finalised; on Avalanche and Polkadot by their own rules.

      USDT also appears on chains Tether doesn't issue on. USDT on BNB Chain is bridged by Binance, not issued by Tether. USDT0, on Arbitrum, Polygon, Plasma and about 20 other chains, is run by Everdawn Labs using LayerZero: USDT is locked in a contract on Ethereum and the same amount is minted elsewhere. Those tokens stand for USDT already counted on Ethereum, so this page leaves them out.

      Freezing, history and the law

      Tether can freeze USDT at any address on the chains it issues on, and its older contracts on TRON and Ethereum can also destroy a frozen balance. It says it works with law enforcement: in April 2026 it put its total at $4.4 B frozen in over 2,300 cases. With TRON and TRM Labs it runs the T3 Financial Crime Unit, launched in 2024.

      In February 2021 Tether and its sister exchange Bitfinex settled with the New York Attorney General for $18.5 M, without admitting wrongdoing. The attorney general alleged that Tether had said USDT was always fully backed by dollars when it wasn't, and required quarterly reserve reports. In October 2021 Tether paid the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission $41 M; the CFTC found that its reserves had been fully backed on only 27.6 % of the days in a 26-month sample from 2016 to 2018. Tether settled without admitting or denying the findings. USDT has no authorisation under the EU's MiCA rules, and the large exchanges delisted it for users in the European Economic Area by March 2025.

      In the United States Tether launched a separate token, USA₮ (USAT), on Ethereum on January 27, 2026. It is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, a federally chartered bank, under the GENIUS Act, with reserves held at Cantor Fitzgerald. It isn't USDT and isn't shown here; about 183 M were on-chain at the end of September 2026.

      What live mode shows

      Live mode reads all 13 chains Tether issues on, straight from public nodes and indexers, every 30 to 60 seconds, and adds them up. On most chains it subtracts Tether's treasury wallet, so the total is close to Tether's own circulating figure; on Solana, Polkadot Asset Hub and Liquid it can't, and their raw totals include unissued tokens. A change between two readings of a chain shows as tokens entering or leaving circulation, with no transaction behind it: usually the treasury paying out or taking tokens back, not new minting. On Ethereum it also reads every new block's USDT transfers for the feed and the transfer rate. TRON carries more USDT transfers than any other chain, but the public TRON API allows only a few requests a second without a key, so its transfers aren't streamed. The reserve comes from Tether's latest quarterly report and is labelled with its date.

      What the animation simplifies

      Tether's reserve is drawn as one vault; in reality it is Treasury bills held through custodians, repo counterparties, gold in vaults, bitcoin wallets and loans. Dollars move by bank wire, not instantly. Each chain is a small ring of wallets, not millions of accounts, and the particles are a scale model: in live mode one standing dot is over a billion USDT. Step-by-step mode starts from an illustrative 1.3 billion. Read Tether's transparency page for its own daily figures.