Tether Deploys on Algorand

Tether has deployed their USDT stablecoin on the Algorand’s permisionless pure proof-of-stake blockchain. The official announcement was made today, February 10.

The news are not surprising since, back in July 2019, Tether officially announced that they will deploy their USDT stablecoin on the Algorand blockchain.

The announcement read:

“With their quest for an equitable, inclusive and borderless economy, Algorand provides the perfect platform upon which to further the impact of Tether.”

Algorand is a permisionless blockchain utilizing the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. More recently, the company announced the release of Algorand 2.0, which added DeFi features and smart contracts to the blockchain. A partnership with PlanetWatch was also recently announced, aiming to address air quality issues by storing data from sensors on the Algorand blockchain.

Tether, on the other hand, has been slowly expanding its stablecoin reach onto new platforms – starting with Omni and Ethereum, and then spreading to Tron and EOS. With this news Algorand becomes only the fifth official platform on which Tether is available.

Tether is by far the largest stablecoin on the crypto market, even surpassing Bitcoin by trading volume in 2019. In fact, Tether is so big that all other stablecoins’ market caps combined don’t amount to USDT’s massive $4.5 billion benchmark.

The deployment of Tether on Algorand is set to benefit both projects, bringing a lot of credibility and exposure to the latter, while helping the former grow in a new environment. Among others, here are some of the benefits to Tether, resulting from its deployment on Algorand:

• The Algorand blockchain is popular for its low transaction fees, making transfers of small amounts of Tether not an issue.
• Transaction finality on Algorand is almost instant, making this iteration of Tether one of the fastest and most secure ways to exchange money.
• Since Tether leverages the ASA feature, it will get full out-of-the-box wallet support from the Algorand wallet.

Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether, noted on the advantages of Algorand and why they decided to go for the collaboration:

“Our latest collaboration with Algorand leverages the speed and security of Algorand’s protocol to give traders fast settlement and reduced counterparty risk in their fiat to digital asset transactions. Tether and Algorand both share a desire to keep building next-generation financial products and we feel our growing customer base will appreciate and benefit greatly from this collaboration.”

Steve Kokinos, Algorand CEO, also expressed excitement:

We are excited that Tether has chosen to join the Algorand ecosystem and its stablecoin will benefit from technology that provides immediate transaction finality and security to support a strong and more stable defi economy.”