Tether (USDT) Stablecoin Launches on Bitcoin's Lightning Network

Stablecoin issuer Tether has announced that its flagship USDT stablecoin, which boasts a market cap of $139 billion, has been launched on Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

Stablecoin issuer Tether has announced the launch of its flagship USDT stablecoin, which boasts a market cap of $139 billion, on Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

In a statement on Monday, Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said that the leading stablecoin issuer is "committed to driving innovation" within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The popular layer-2 scaling solution, which was rolled out in early 2018, enables fast and cheap Bitcoin transactions.

Circling back to the start

Tether's USDT, which was launched back in 2014, was initially available on Omni, a software layer built on top of Bitcoin.

The Omni layer (originally known as Mastercoin) was actually one of the first efforts to scale the original blockchain network.

In early 2018, USDT tokens became available on the Ethereum blockchain with the help of ERC-20 USDT. This was the start of the demise of the OMNI version. The ERC-20 version started growing at a fast pace due to its higher efficiency. In March 2019, Tether also announced its decision to launch the stablecoin version on Tron.

Binance, the leading cryptocurrency exchange, dropped OMNI-based USDT tokens back in 2021.

As reported by U.Today, Tether eventually removed support for OMNI in August 2023. It accounted for less than 0.3% of the total supply.

A slew of blockchains

As of now, the token can be used on a total of 17 blockchains, including Solana and Avalanche.

The versions that run on Ethereum and Tron account for the vast majority of tokens in circulation ($74.4 billion and $59 billion in circulation, respectively).