Tether has long become a giant in the stablecoin industry thanks to the global circulation of USDT. With annual profits of $13 billion from government bond interest alone, it is one of the most profitable financial technology companies in the world. However, when reviewing its business model, Tether found that although it had reaped enough profits from the issuance and management of USDT, it did not receive the real on-chain economic profit sharing.
USDT contributes nearly $100,000 to Ethereums daily gas fees, accounting for more than 6% of the total Ethereum transaction fees. But thats not all. Tron is the ultimate stage for USDT value capture. According to the latest on-chain data, USDTs transfer volume and gas consumption on Tron have accounted for more than 98% of the entire public chain. In other words, Trons trading prosperity is almost entirely dependent on USDT blood transfusion.
For each USDT on-chain transfer, the fee paid by the user is usually between 0.3 and 8 US dollars. From a more intuitive data point of view, the current daily on-chain revenue of the Tron network exceeds 2.1 million US dollars, which is converted into an annualized revenue of up to 770 million US dollars. Most of this comes from the high-frequency transfer fees of USDT. The number of on-chain transactions in the entire Tron network within 24 hours reached 2.46 million, and the average fee for each transaction was about 0.85 US dollars, which is basically consistent with the average on-chain fee rate of USDT. At present, the overall market value of Tron has exceeded 25 billion US dollars, and its stable on-chain revenue scale has long been at the forefront of major public chains.
Data source: DefiLama
For Tether, this is actually a typical imbalance in value capture. The issuance and branding of USDT has brought huge user traffic and industrial-level stability demand, but all on-chain fees and ecological dividends have long been dominated by infrastructure taxation rather than Tether itself. This not only weakens Tethers strategic voice in the future on-chain payment and settlement network, but also makes it lose its initiative when facing new threats such as TRONs self-developed stablecoin and even traffic diversion.
If Tether is only satisfied with being a super mint of stablecoins but does not have a dominant position in the on-chain infrastructure, the future value ceiling of Tether will be extremely limited.
This is also the fundamental reason why Tether has invested all its efforts in its own stablecoin chain ecosystem. Through the exclusive chain model, Tether can not only recover the huge fees and ecological dividends that originally flowed to public chains such as Ethereum and Tron to its own system, but also establish its own closed loop on the chain in terms of B2B payment, compliance settlement, and industrial collaboration.
More importantly, Tron is currently trying to reduce its dependence on USDT.
Recently, Tron launched the Trump family’s USD1 stablecoin. Tron founder Justin Sun is an advisor to the Trump family’s DeFi project and the “big brother” of the TRUMP coin. The two parties have a somewhat “close and inseparable” and complicated relationship, which seems to suggest that Tron may intend to gradually reduce the use and issuance of USDT in the next few years.
In addition, from the perspective of handling fee costs, TRONs advantage as a stablecoin settlement network is gradually weakening. Without purchasing and destroying TRX, TRONs current transaction fee even exceeds that of the traditionally expensive Bitcoin network, and is also higher than the Ethereum mainnet, Apots chain, and BNB chain.
This is not a good thing for USDT, because in comparison, the fee for transferring USDC through the Base network is only $0.000409. Even Circle’s Circle Paymaster feature allows users to use USDC to pay gas fees on Arbitrum and Base networks.
Therefore, these trends and competitive threats force Tether to adjust its business strategy as soon as possible.
Plasma: The source of TRON’s anxiety
Tethers first step was to quietly support a new chain called Plasma at the end of 2024.
At first, there were only a few announcements and a few rounds of financing - Bitfinex (Tethers parent company), Peter Thiels Founders Fund, Framework and other capitals successively injected US$24 million, and attracted another US$3.5 million in external funds. In just two months, Plasmas valuation was pushed to US$500 million.
Plasma uses the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inherits the security of UTXO, and is directly compatible with EVM at the execution layer. Most importantly, all transactions on the chain can be paid directly with USDT gas, and USDT transfers are completely free.
It is precisely because of the simple and direct selling point of zero transaction fees that when the official recently released the governance token XPL quota to allow users to deposit liquidity, the first batch of $500 million was snapped up in a few minutes, and the newly added $500 million deposit limit was sold out within 30 minutes. In order to enter the market early, some big investors even paid $100,000 in gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet to grab a channel. This shows the markets desire for a zero-fee stablecoin chain.
In addition to the technical architecture, Plasma has quietly inserted two chips. The first is native privacy. On-chain transfers are public by default, but if users need to mask the address and amount, they can enter the shielding mode by simply checking an option in the wallet; if they encounter audit or compliance requirements, they can also selectively disclose. The second is Bitcoin liquidity. Plasma promises to use the permissionless bridge to seamlessly introduce native BTC to the chain, and with Tethers deep US dollar pool, low-slippage exchange and BTC collateralized stablecoin borrowing can be completed in the same environment.
All of this also echoes Tether’s action of “hoarding Bitcoin” over the past year. The Plasma team and Bitfinex’s partners have long been advocates of Bitcoin.
At the center stage of the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stood in front of an image of Wukong and said, Bitcoin is my Wukong, and it is our friend.
In the spring of 2025, Tether announced that it would become a major shareholder in Twenty One Capital, a Bitcoin finance company similar to MicroStrategy that was listed on the Nasdaq through an acquisition and merger.
Tether spent $458.7 million to increase its BTC holdings and transferred another 37,000 bitcoins to a new address, providing ammunition for Twenty One Capital. Currently, Tether and Twenty One Capital hold a total of about 137,000 bitcoins, ranking third among all listed companies holding bitcoins, second only to MicroStrategy and mining company MARA Holdings.
Data source: https://bitbo.io/
The outside world originally wondered why Tether exchanged stablecoin profits for digital gold. Now the answer is obvious: USDT is used as the clearing currency and BTC is used as the reserve asset. The two are merged in Plasma, bringing together the $150 billion USDT scattered across more than a dozen networks into a unified clearing layer, allowing transfers, exchanges, and recoveries to take place on Tethers own territory.
At the time of the mainnet beta release, Plasma will be the ninth largest blockchain in the world by stablecoin liquidity, valued at $1 billion
In the past, Tether had to follow the pace of Ethereum and Tron. Once the other party raised the fee rate or modified the rules, USDT could only passively cooperate. The infrastructure supporting USDT (settlement, execution, bridging, etc.) was also largely out of Tethers control. Now, Plasma has put the issuance, circulation, and recycling into its own ecosystem. Tether will also gain more pricing power and voice, and naturally hold the charging gate of this network.
How much more can Plasma earn for Tether in a year?
Although Plasma offers zero fees for USDT transfers, it does not mean that Plasma has no income.
The reason why Plasma dares to shout to users that USDT transfers are completely free is not because Tether subsidizes with real money, but because it divides all transactions into two billing methods based on complexity and priority. To put it in a simple way, it is like children under 1.2 meters are free of charge.
Ordinary USDT transfers occupy a small block, just like children under 1.2 meters tall. Nodes directly pack such transactions into blocks and do not charge users for gas. However, in order to prevent spam transactions, Plasma has a basic throughput limit. At the same time, in order to avoid malicious spam transactions, users also need to leave a small collateral on the chain to serve as a margin: once the abuse threshold is triggered, the collateral will be automatically confiscated. This not only preserves the free experience, but also blocks spam traffic.
Other requests beyond simple transfers, that is, more complex operations, such as calling multiple contracts at a time, batch clearing, institutional-level ultra-fast settlement, etc., will be recognized by the system and will need to pay fees. The main income of Plasma nodes comes from here, plus the micro-fees collected from cross-chain assets and custody services, the entire network has the ability to generate its own blood. Precisely because simple transfers are no longer charged, the unit price of the charging model can be more flexible: according to current estimates on the chain, thousands of free payments per second consume only very low resources, and nodes can cover costs and maintain a surplus with a small amount of high-level services.
The mechanism is supported by Plasmas double-layer skeleton. The bottom layer regularly anchors the block status back to Bitcoin, outsourcing security to BTCs proof of work; the upper layer is directly compatible with EVM, and developers can move Ethereum contracts over and run them. After removing the traditional Gas calculation, the execution efficiency is higher. Messari mentioned in the evaluation report that Plasmas improved consensus can stably process thousands of payments on a single-core CPU in stress testing, and the nodes reward comes entirely from that part of the complex transaction.
So how does Plasma make money? The answer is obvious.
First, enterprise-level dedicated lines - if cross-border remittance companies or game publishers want to push transfers from milliseconds to sub-milliseconds, they have to enter the paid lane and pay a fixed USDT monthly fee to ensure bandwidth.
Second, contracts and batch liquidation - DeFi protocols still require the payment of Gas to call complex logic, but the unit of measurement has changed from ETH to USDT.
Third, bridging and custody - when assets are transferred from other chains to Plasma or redeemed from Plasma, a small export tax must be paid. This money goes into the Plasma treasury and is then distributed to nodes and foundations according to the rules.
Fourth, the inflation of the governance token XPL - validators stake XPL to obtain block rewards, and the Plasma Treasury reserves a portion of it for auction over time to continuously subsidize peer-to-peer USDT 0g as payments.
The combination of these four is enough to feed back the network expenses of free transfers and even bring a new cash flow to Tether.
Assuming that Plasma can successfully take over most of the USDT traffic currently running on Tron and Ethereum, the first direct income will be most of the on-chain transaction fees intercepted by Tron and Ethereum - the annual income can reach approximately US$1 billion to US$2 billion. Combined with enterprise services and cross-chain fees, the new revenue range is expected to reach US$1.2 to US$3 billion.
However, because Plasma does not require ordinary USDT transfer fees, it is conservatively estimated that Plasma can bring Tether $1 billion in revenue a year.
Plasma may also have other hidden benefits and ecological spillovers: for example, attracting new large-scale liquidity and projects to join, collecting certain taxes; providing SDK, enterprise node access, charging commercial fees for on-chain applications, etc.
Comparing this new cash leg with Tethers existing ledger is even more intuitive: In 2024, of Tethers approximately $13 billion in revenue, $7 billion will come from Treasury interest, $45 million will come from 0.1% issuance/redemption fees, and the remaining nearly $6 billion will be floating profits from investments in Bitcoin, gold, and early projects. This means that Plasma may be able to raise Tethers annual profit by another 15% to 20%.
Stable: USDT L1 chain tailored for institutions
After Plasma embraced the liquidity and developer ecosystem of these chains, Tether did not stop there. This month, an L1 chain Stable supported by Bitfinex and USDT unified liquidity protocol USDT0 was officially announced, and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino is a consultant for the project.
Unlike Plasma, the Bitcoin L2, Stable is an L1 chain. Although it also uses USDT as gas and peer-to-peer USDT transfers are free, it targets a completely different audience: global financial institutions, corporate settlements, bulk clearing, on-chain corporate finance, B2B cross-border, etc., rather than retail/small-amount scenarios.
The Stable internal testnet is now online, and the team is guiding early builders to explore SDKs for wallets, applications, and custody integrations, including fast fiat currency listings, smart contracts operating in US dollars, and wallets that can run without gas, so users don’t even realize they are on the blockchain.
The clues to Stables landing are hidden in Tethers recent intensive commodity investments. This spring, Tether spent money to acquire a 70% stake in Adecoagro, a Latin American agricultural and renewable energy giant, and then announced that USDT will directly participate in the settlement of South American grain, oil, ethanol and even crude oil. On June 5, Tether announced a strategic investment in Shiga Digital, an African blockchain financial platform. Shiga Digital provides virtual accounts, over-the-counter trading services, fund management and foreign exchange (FX) services to African companies. More recently, on June 12, Tether announced the acquisition of approximately 31.9% of the shares (78,421,780 shares) of Elemental, a Canadian listed gold mining company, and has signed an option agreement with AlphaStream Limited, allowing it to purchase an additional 34,444,580 shares after October 29, 2025.
Traditional bulk trade has long relied on bank wire transfers and letters of credit. A shipload of goods can easily cost tens of millions of dollars, and it often takes several days for funds to be cleared in the banking system. If the money is converted into USDT on the chain, the cross-border counterparty can release it in seconds. Stables corporate channel just reserves a dedicated express line for this kind of large-scale, compliant, and low-latency US dollar flow. Clearing houses and custodians can even use the USDT0 bridge protocol to cross the stablecoins in and out without having to worry about which chain the other side is running on.
For large merchants who hold physical assets and must report accounts in compliance, as long as the clearing efficiency can really crush traditional wire transfers, they don’t mind paying a little more channel fees; for Tether, this part of the flow is also much more stable and has higher gross profit than retail transfers. More importantly, after Stable packages USDT + physical objects into the same ledger, Tether can finally bury the US dollar flow it captures on the chain directly into grains, energy and even the entire supply chain. Paolo Ardoino said in an interview earlier that the biggest incremental scenario for USDT in the next five years is not crypto trading, but commodity trading.
The two chains have clear division of labor: Plasma solves the on-chain user experience and uses 0 Gas to turn small flows into large volumes; Stable solves institutional compliance and uses dedicated clearing to turn large volumes into sustainable high profits. They have only one common goal - to make USDT no longer restricted by the fees of any public chain, and no longer be taxed by any single ecosystem. From daily remittances to 10,000 tons of soybeans, all US dollar flows will eventually return to Tethers own ledger, which is the ultimate landing point of chain sovereignty counterattack.
Tether’s new stablecoin exclusively for the US?
“Americans want a checking account (daily payment), while overseas users treat USDT as savings (digital savings)”. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino recently said that Tether’s next move is to localize the US dollar payment currency.
Previously, Paolo revealed that Tether might set up a new company in the United States to issue a new stablecoin specifically for local payment scenarios, while the existing USDT will still focus on international markets and developing regions. When asked whether Tether would build a payment network similar to Square and support stablecoin payments, Paolo replied: I cant reveal all the plans now, but your thinking direction is correct.
This is inseparable from a role that cannot be avoided - the US banking industry.
Last week, Paolo forwarded the news that the first major bank in the United States had clearly stated its willingness to issue a stablecoin to X, and added a meaningful sentence Select your player. The industry immediately speculated that Tether was likely to cooperate with this bank.
What many people don’t know is that Tether has a heavyweight assistant on Wall Street: Cantor Fitzgerald, led by billionaire Howard Lutnick, former Secretary of Commerce during the Trump era, now manages billions of dollars in Tether Treasury bond positions and is also the most important spokesperson for USDT in the traditional capital market. Once the US version of the stablecoin goes online, Cantor’s clearing network and market-making seats will naturally be the best liquidity backing.
Of course, Tether’s “black and gray attributes” are still being repeatedly scrutinized by U.S. regulators: the Treasury Department’s report named Mexican drug cartels as fond of using USDT, and some lawmakers simply used it as a “negative example” for cryptocurrencies. Tether first moved its registered address to Bitcoin-friendly El Salvador, and then bought hundreds of billions of U.S. Treasury bonds in the U.S. bond market, using the “I am a U.S. creditor” to reversely reduce policy risks.
In this way, Plasma has firmly attracted retail investors zero-fee payments and on-chain developers into the Tether ecosystem; Stable is moving tons of soybeans, crude oil, and cross-border salaries to millisecond-level dollar settlement; and the US payment coin that is about to land is ready to uproot the last moat of bank wire transfers. The three networks have clear division of labor, but they all hold the toll gate in the same hand.
