Tether stablecoin empire expands: Plasma and Stable dual chain progression

As a giant in the stablecoin industry, Tether can earn a profit of $13 billion a year solely from government bond interest, making it one of the most profitable fintech companies in the world. However, Tether has found that while it has made huge profits from the issuance and management of USDT, the real "on-chain economic sharing" has not been realized.

USDT contributes nearly $100,000 in Gas fees daily on Ethereum, accounting for over 6% of the total Ethereum transaction fee consumption. On the Tron network, the transfer volume and Gas consumption of USDT account for more than 98% of the entire public chain. Currently, the Tron network generates over $2.1 million in on-chain revenue daily, with an annualized income of up to $770 million, the vast majority of which comes from the high-frequency transfer fees of USDT.

This situation of "value capture imbalance" undermines Tether's strategic dominance in the future on-chain payment and settlement networks. To change this situation, Tether is fully committed to building its own stablecoin chain ecosystem. Through a dedicated chain model, Tether can not only "reclaim the huge transaction fees and ecological dividends" that would originally flow to other public chains back into its own system, but also build its own on-chain closed loop in areas such as B2B payments, compliant settlements, and industrial collaboration.

Tether's first step is to support a new chain called Plasma by the end of 2024. Plasma uses the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the security of UTXO, while being compatible with EVM at the execution layer. Most importantly, all transactions on the chain can be paid for gas directly with USDT, and USDT transfers are completely free.

In addition to the technical architecture, Plasma also incorporates two important features: native privacy and Bitcoin liquidity. Users can choose to obscure addresses and amounts, or selectively disclose them as needed. At the same time, Plasma promises to seamlessly bring native BTC on-chain through a permissionless bridge, in conjunction with Tether's deep dollar pool, to achieve low slippage exchanges and BTC collateral lending.

Plasma's revenue mainly comes from enterprise-level "dedicated lines", contracts and bulk settlements, bridging and custody services, as well as the inflation of the governance token XPL. Conservatively estimated, Plasma could bring Tether $1 billion in revenue each year, equivalent to an increase of 15%-20% in Tether's annual profit.

In addition to Plasma, Tether has also launched an L1 chain called Stable, mainly aimed at global financial institutions, corporate settlements, bulk clearing, on-chain corporate finance, and B2B cross-border scenarios. Stable provides a "dedicated fast lane" for large, compliant, low-latency USD flows, allowing USDT to penetrate the grain, energy, and even the entire supply chain.

Tether also plans to launch a new stablecoin specifically aimed at local payment scenarios in the United States, possibly in collaboration with the American banking sector. This will further expand Tether's influence and challenge the traditional banking wire transfer system.

Through Plasma, stablecoins, and potential domestic payment coins in the United States, Tether is building a comprehensive stablecoin ecosystem that covers various fields from everyday small payments to large commodity transactions, consolidating its leadership position in the stablecoin market.