Stablecoin issuer Tether minted $1B worth of USDT tokens at Tether Treasury to meet future issuance demands on the Ethereum network.
On June 12, data analytics firm Whale Alert reported that the firm behind the stablecoin with the largest market cap printed $1B USDT tokens in its latest mint.
Subsequently, Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino took to Twitter to clarify that Tether’s fresh batch of USDT tokens serves as inventory replenishment for the firm. According to him, the $1B worth of stablecoin assets will support chain swaps and aid third-party crypto exchanges in rebalancing their USDT reserves. In his words,
“This is an authorized but not issued transaction, meaning that this amount will be used as inventory for next period issuance requests and chain swaps.”
Similarly, crypto exchange Binance announced it will collaborate with the Tether team to swap $750M in USDT from TRON (TRX) to the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain hours after Ardoino published his tweet.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time Tether has minted a large amount of USDT tokens. Earlier in March 2023, the stablecoin issuer minted a batch of $1B USDT, with Ardoino posting a similar tweet on using the freshly minted stablecoin assets as inventory for future issuance of USDT.