Tether teases new assets as old ones are forgotten

Tether chief exec Paolo Ardoino has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to tease that Tether is prepared to “unveil its new class of digital assets” next week.

It’s not clear exactly what digital assets will be announced next week, but we do know that they will be the latest in a long line of digital assets launched by the stablecoin giant, many of which have now been largely forgotten.

The most popular asset Tether has created is, of course, USDT, which is ‘tethered’ to the value of the US dollar. However, it also has assets tied to other currencies like the Euro, Offshore Yuan, and the Mexican Peso.

Perhaps the most interesting of these assets is the Offshore Yuan Tether, which was launched in collaboration with Zhao Dong. Dong was once one of the most prominent over-the-counter traders in China and had previously disclosed that he was a Tether shareholder.

After the announcement of this product, he was arrested and eventually convicted of charges equivalent to money laundering in China. The last time any of this asset left the Tether Treasury on Ethereum was 2019 and the most recent time assets went back to the Treasury was January 2023. On Tron Offshore Yuan Tether has only left the Treasury once, also in January 2023.

Read more: China’s crypto king pleads guilty to laundering $480M for online casinos, report

The Euro version of Tether has less than €32 million in circulation, largely on the Omni Layer, an implementation that Tether announced last year it was discontinuing support for. The last transaction from the issuer address for Euro tether on the Omni layer was in 2019 to revoke 1,000 tokens, a quantity well under the $100,000 USD minimum redemption size that Tether advertises.

The story is barely any better on Ethereum, where the last time tokens left the Tether Treasury was in July of 2022.

The Mexican Peso version of Tether is a newer asset launched in 2022 and there are approximately Mex$20 million in circulation. No assets have left the Tether Treasury for this asset since June of 2022.

Furthermore, Tether has never shared an audit or attestation for any of these assets.

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