Coinbase Lists Tether’s USDT Shortly After Going Public
- USDT trading on Coinbase will begin on 26 April, with the stablecoin being available in all Coinbase supported jurisdictions, except New York state.
- At launch, USDT trading will be available only to Coinbase Pro users, and the exchange will only support the ERC-20 version of the stablecoin.
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U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase will be providing support for Tether’s stablecoin, USDT, on its Pro trading platform, the exchange announced on 23 April.
According to the blog post, the exchange plans to begin USDT trading on 26 April if its liquidity conditions are met, and a sufficient supply of USDT has been deposited to the platform. The order books are planned to launch in three phases: “post-only, limit-only and full trading”. Even though USDT operates on several blockchains — such as Ethereum, EOS, Solana and Polkadot — Coinbase will only support the ERC-20 version of the stablecoin. The exchange further stressed that for now the stablecoin will only be available to its Pro users, explaining:
“USDT is not yet available on Coinbase.com or via our Consumer mobile apps. We will make a separate announcement if and when this support is added.”
Inbound transfers for USDT are already available to all Coinbase supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York state. The USDT listing came just over a week after Coinbase went public through its listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange, putting the exchange under the U.S. SEC’s oversight. It has also been only two months since Tether settled with the New York Attorney General’s office.
The operator of the USDT stablecoin, Tether, was first accused of market manipulation back in 2019, when a lawsuit alleged it had engaged in a “sophisticated scheme” involving “part-fraud, part-pump-and-dump, and part-money laundering”. While the investigation was stopped at some point, it was restarted in July 2020 by the New York Attorney General (NYAG), who wanted to look into the USDC stablecoin and whether it was backed 1 to 1 by the U.S. dollar.
The NYAG and Tether finally reached a settlement in February 2021, after a 22-month long probe into its parent company iFinex. As part of the settlement, crypto exchange Bitfinex and Tether agreed to pay a $18.5 million in penalties, and provide periodic reports to the NYAG showing how the stablecoin is backed and what reserves it has.
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