Quarterly Tether (USDT) collateral backing, by asset type 2023-2024
Published by
Roughly 85 percent of all Tether coins were backed up by cash, cash equivalents, short-term deposits, and commercial paper. This is common for centralized "off-chain collateralized stablecoins", a type of stablecoin that uses traditional reserve assets to stabilize their price. Typically, the issuers of the stablecoin are real-world companies and use fiat-currency bank deposits or short-term debt as a collateral. Users can buy stablecoins from these issues against the same fiat currency. Important to note here is that the backing is not found on the blockchain and essentially assumes that the issuer actually has the money somewhere in a (physical) vault. Therefore, the likes of Tether or USD Coin fall under the scrutiny of a real-world custodian. This "fiat-money" approach to stablecoins is a far cry from two other approaches that exist: On-chain collaterization - which means the coins are backed with other crypto assets like Ethereum (ETH) or decentralized crypto loans - and algorithmic stablecoins - stablecoins with little or no backing but that use an algorithm to automatically adjust the number of tokens in circulation based on demand, to keep their prices level. The most well-known example of an algorithmic stablecoin was TerraUSD (UST), which used its sister coin Terra or LUNA as support.
