First published 12 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 for the chains USDT now sits on, and for the freeze switch. Tether is a token that tries to stay near one US dollar. USDT is the ticker. Tether Limited is the company that creates it and says it will redeem it. The blockchain is only the notebook the balance is written in. Bitcoin cannot print a tether, and a tether is not a claim on a bitcoin.
That split is the whole page. Stablecoins: useful, not magic is the category. What is USDC? is the other large company dollar. This page is Tether’s.
Where it came from
A group including Brock Pierce launched the token in October 2014 under the name Realcoin, then renamed it Tether. The first version moved on Omni, a layer that recorded tokens in Bitcoin transactions. Later versions were issued as an ERC-20 on Ethereum, as a TRC-20 on TRON, and on other chains besides. Each of those is a separate entry. Tether treats them as the same liability. The chains do not. What is TRON (TRX)? is the chain that now carries a large share of the dollar tokens people actually send. The asset they are sending is still USDT, not TRX.
Tether Limited sits with the same corporate family as Bitfinex. That relationship is not gossip. In April 2019 the New York Attorney General said Bitfinex had lost access to hundreds of millions at a payment processor and had covered the hole with a line of credit on Tether’s reserves. New York’s Tether order is about a balance sheet, not a peg algorithm is that case. The token’s price staying near a dollar did not make the balance sheet a bank statement.
What you actually hold
You hold a token in a contract, or a balance on an exchange that promises the token. You do not hold a dollar bill, a Treasury bill, or a deposit in your name at Tether’s bank. Redemption, for the customers Tether allows to redeem, is a company process with a minimum and a terms sheet. A market price of one dollar on an exchange is traders agreeing, which is how the peg usually holds, and how it can slip by a fraction when they do not.
Tether publishes reports on what it says the reserves contain: cash, Treasuries, and other instruments, in mixes that have changed. A report is an attestation under the scope the accountant was given. It is not a 10-K, and it is not your account. The GENIUS Act is a stablecoin statute. It is not MiCA, and it is not a dollar. A statute about issuers does not turn the token in a wallet into insured cash.
The company can stop a coin from moving
On the chains where Tether’s contract allows it, the company can freeze an address. A frozen balance stays visible. It does not move. That is how law enforcement and the issuer stop particular tokens. It is also a fact about control: the same letters USDT on a public chain are still a company’s instrument. Freezing one address does not halt Ethereum or TRON. It halts that balance.
The wrong chain is the ordinary loss
Ethereum USDT and TRON USDT share a ticker and a logo. They do not share an address. An Ethereum address starts with 0x. A TRON address starts with T. Paste one into the other and the coins do not arrive. A bridge that wraps USDT onto a third chain makes a third token. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Read the network badge on the deposit page out loud. Then read whether it says USDT or a different dollar token that happens to be near it in the list.
Nothing here is an instruction to buy, redeem, or hold USDT. A dollar token is a company product that lives on a ledger. Keep both halves of that sentence.
