On Tuesday (April 6), Tether Operations Limited (“Tether”), the company that issues the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, announced that it is planning to launch Tether tokens (“USDt”) on the Polkadot network. Before USDt gets launched on Polkadot, it will go live on Kusama, which is currently serving as a canary/test network (or pre-production environment) for Polkadot.
The following diagram from the Polkadot Wiki highlights some of the differences between Polkadot and Kusama:
According to Tether’s press release, “the launch of USDt on Polkadot is pending the formation of parachains.” The goal is for USDt to become the first ever stablecoin on the Polkadot network. Since parachains will first launch on Kusama, USDt will go live there before launching on Polkadot.
Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Tether, had this to say:
“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 is one of the most exciting projects in the digital token ecosystem and we anticipate a ready uptake of the Tether token as it powers Polkadot’s emerging DeFi ecosystem.
“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.“
USDt “works across a diversity of different blockchains, including Algorand, Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni, Tron and Solana.”
