USDT is a fully-reserved stablecoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency, or digital asset. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that fluctuate in price, USDT is designed to maintain price equivalence to the US dollar. USDT is a stable store of value that benefits from the speed and security of blockchain technology.

USDT is a digital dollar backed 100% by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets and is always redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. A portion of the USDT reserve is invested in the Tether Reserve Fund (USDXX), an SEC-regulated money market fund managed by BlackRock. Daily independent third-party reporting on the portfolio is publicly available. See more on our Transparency page.

Businesses can open a Tether Account to exchange US dollars for USDT. When a business deposits USD into their Tether Account, Tether issues the equivalent amount of USDT to the business. The process of issuing new USDT is known as “minting”. This process creates new USDT in circulation.

Similarly, when a business wants to exchange their USDT for US dollars, the business can deposit USDT into their Tether Account and request to receive US dollars for free. This process of redeeming USDT is known as “burning”. This process takes USDT out of circulation.

When US dollars are swapped for USDT on a digital asset exchange, the exchange will typically provide the balance of USDT it has on-hand to fulfill the swap. If the exchange needs more USDT to fulfill the swap, the exchange will often use its Tether Account to mint more USDT.

A fast and easy way for businesses to access USDT is to open a free Tether Account.

USDT can also be accessed quickly from digital asset exchanges like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Binance.us.

Developers can start building on USDT today by accessing our GitHub repo. Additional resources are available from our USDT for Developers page.

USDT lives natively on 11 blockchains: Algorand, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stellar, TRON, OP Mainnet, and Base – with more native integrations expected this year and beyond.

USDT has also been bridged to Polygon, Fantom, NEAR, the Cosmos ecosystem, and many more emerging blockchains.

For more details, check out our USDT for Developers page.