Tether to Launch on Polkadot, Kusama

The largest stablecoin by market capitalisation, Tether (USDT), will be launching on Polkadot, making it the first stablecoin to be deployed on the multichain network, Tether said in a press release shared with The Chain Bulletin on 6 April.

According to the announcement, USDT will first launch on Polkadot’s cousin network Kusama, which serves as a “value-bearing testbed” for technologies in the Polkadot ecosystem. With its more than $40 billion market capitalization across different blockchains, USDT is perfectly suited to support Polkadot’s emerging DeFi ecosystem. Tether’s CTO, Paolo Ardoino, said in a statement:

“We’re excited to launch USDt on Polkadot, offering its growing and vibrant community access to the most liquid, stable and trusted stablecoin in the digital token space. Polkadot, with its parachain structure, has the ability to grow significantly in the coming years. This growth will be driven by its high level of scalability.”

Created by Ethereum’s co-founder Gavin Wood, Polkadot is a “multi-chain network” that aims to connect different specialized blockchains into a single unified network, enabling them to work in parallel as “parachains”. Kusama, on the other hand, is a public pre-production environment for Polkadot with less rules, which allows developers to experiment with new applications before making them available on Polkadot.

According to Peter Mauric, the Head of Public Affairs at Parity Technologies, USDT will be a great addition to the growing Polkadot ecosystem due to its popularity as a cross-platform settlement tool. Mauric also said dApp developers that wish to create multi-chain features are now looking for established stablecoins that operate across numerous networks, to ensure a smooth experience for their users. The USDT stablecoin already supports networks such as Algorand, Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni and Tron. Mauric said in a statement:

“The launch of USDt on Kusama and Polkadot is a crucial step in achieving that vision, where developers will be able to seamlessly compose trustless applications across chains, networks and communities.”

Back in March, Tether also became the first stablecoin to be made available on the Solana blockchain. By integrating USDT with its blockchain, Solana hopes to encourage the building of a range of projects in the DeFi, blockchain gaming and Web 3.0 spaces.