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Tether布局 Plasma and Stable chains to seize the stablecoin ecological value chain.
Expansion of the Tether Stablecoin Empire
Tether has become a giant in the stablecoin industry thanks to the global circulation of USDT, with an annual profit of 13 billion USD solely from government bond interest, making it one of the most profitable fintech companies in the world. However, Tether has found that although it profits handsomely from the issuance and management of USDT, the real "on-chain economic sharing" has not made its way into its own hands.
USDT contributes nearly $100,000 in Gas fees daily on Ethereum, accounting for over 6% of the total Ethereum transaction fees. On Tron, the transfer volume and Gas consumption of USDT exceed 98% of the entire public chain, which means that the trading prosperity of Tron almost entirely relies on USDT's "blood transfusion".
The TRON network currently generates over $2.1 million in on-chain revenue daily, with an annualized income reaching as high as $770 million. The vast majority of this comes from high-frequency transfer fees of USDT. TRON has seen as many as 2.46 million on-chain transactions within 24 hours, with an average transaction fee of about $0.85, which is basically in line with the on-chain average rate of USDT. Currently, TRON's overall market capitalization has exceeded $25 billion, and its stable on-chain revenue scale has long ranked among the top of various public chains.
For Tether, this is a typical "value capture imbalance". The issuance and brand of USDT bring huge user traffic and industrial-level stable demand, but all on-chain fees and ecological dividends are long-term "taxed" by the infrastructure, rather than being led by Tether itself. This not only weakens Tether's strategic discourse power in future on-chain payment and settlement networks, but also makes it lose initiative when facing new threats such as the self-developed stablecoin of TRON or even traffic diversion.
If Tether is only satisfied with being a "super minting factory" for stablecoins, without having a leading position in on-chain infrastructure, its future value ceiling will be extremely limited. This is also the fundamental reason why Tether is fully committed to its own stablecoin chain ecosystem. Through the exclusive chain model, Tether can not only reclaim the huge transaction fees and ecological dividends that originally flowed to public chains like Ethereum and Tron back to its own system, but also establish its own on-chain closed loop in areas such as B2B payments, compliant settlement, and industrial collaboration.
Moreover, Tron is currently trying to reduce its dependence on USDT. Recently, Tron launched the USD1 stablecoin from the Trump family. Tron founder Justin Sun is himself an advisor to the Trump family's DeFi project and the "top brother" of TRUMP coin, indicating a complex relationship between the two parties, which seems to suggest that Tron may intend to gradually reduce its use and issuance of USDT in the coming years.
In addition, from the perspective of transaction fee costs, the advantage of Tron as a stablecoin settlement network is also gradually weakening. Without purchasing and burning TRX, the current transaction fees on Tron even exceed those of the traditionally expensive Bitcoin network, and are also higher than those of the Ethereum mainnet, Apots chain, and BNB chain.
In comparison, the fee for transferring USDC via the Base network is only $0.000409. The Circle Paymaster feature launched by Circle even allows users to pay gas fees with USDC on the Arbitrum and Base networks.
These trends and competitive threats force Tether to quickly adjust its business strategy.
Plasma: The Source of Anxiety for Tron
The first step of Tether was to quietly support a new chain called Plasma by the end of 2024.
Initially, there were only a few announcements and financing - a certain exchange platform (, the parent company of Tether ), and certain investment funds successively injected 24 million USD, followed by bringing in 3.5 million USD in external funding, rapidly pushing Plasma's valuation to 500 million USD in just two months.
Plasma uses the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the security of UTXO, while directly being compatible with EVM at the execution layer. Most importantly, all on-chain transactions can directly use USDT to pay gas, making USDT transfers completely free.
Due to the simple and direct selling point of "zero fees", the recent release of the governance token XPL quota by the official team allowed users to provide liquidity, and the first batch of five hundred million dollars was snatched up in just a few minutes. The additional five hundred million dollar deposit limit was sold out within 30 minutes. Some large investors even paid a gas fee of one hundred thousand dollars on the Ethereum mainnet to rush into the channel. This shows the market's desire for a "no-fee stablecoin chain".
Outside of the technical architecture, Plasma has quietly introduced two chips. The first is "native privacy". On-chain transfers are public by default, but if users need to obscure the address and amount, they can simply select an option in their wallet to enter privacy mode; for audits or compliance requirements, selective disclosure is also possible. The second is "Bitcoin liquidity". Plasma promises to seamlessly bring native BTC on-chain through a permissionless bridge, and in conjunction with Tether's deep dollar pool, low-slippage exchanges and BTC collateralized borrowing of stablecoins can all be completed in the same environment.
All of this resonates with Tether's "hoarding Bitcoin" actions over the past year. The Plasma team and a partner of a certain trading platform have long been advocates of Bitcoin.
At the center stage of the Bitcoin conference in 2025, the CEO of Tether stated, "Bitcoin is my Wukong, it is our friend."
In the spring of 2025, Tether announced it would become a major shareholder of a certain company, which went public on Nasdaq through a merger and acquisition, and is a Bitcoin financial company similar to MicroStrategy.
Tether invested $458.7 million to increase its BTC holdings and transferred 37,000 bitcoins to a new address, providing ammunition for the company. Currently, Tether and the company hold approximately 137,000 bitcoins, making it the third largest publicly traded company holding bitcoins, following MicroStrategy and a certain mining company.
The outside world was initially puzzled about what Tether aimed to achieve by converting stablecoin profits into "digital gold". Now the answer is clear: USDT serves as the settlement currency, while BTC acts as the reserve asset. The two merge in Plasma, gathering the 150 billion USD worth of USDT scattered across more than a dozen networks into a unified settlement layer, allowing transfers, exchanges, and redemptions to occur on Tether's own territory.
When the mainnet test version is released, Plasma will rank as the ninth largest blockchain in the world by stablecoin liquidity, valued at 1 billion USD.
In the past, Tether had to follow the pace of Ethereum and TRON. Once the other party raised fees or modified rules, USDT could only passively cooperate. The infrastructure supporting USDT, such as settlement, execution, and bridging, which is represented by (, is largely beyond Tether's control. However, now Plasma has integrated issuance, circulation, and recycling into its own ecosystem, allowing Tether to gain more pricing power and influence, naturally seizing control of the fee gates of this network.
![Left hand Plasma, right hand Stable, the stablecoin empire of Tether expands])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-d0cb5a2c2cd74a0e1b936e2b84739a35.webp(
How much can Plasma earn Tether in a year?
Although Plasma offers zero fees for USDT transfers, it does not mean that Plasma has no revenue.
The reason Plasma dares to tell users "USDT transfers are completely free" is not because Tether subsidizes with real money, but because it has divided all transactions into two billing methods based on complexity and priority. To put it in a simple way, it’s like saying "Children under 1 meter are free."
Ordinary USDT transfers occupy a small block, just like "children under 1 meter 2", the nodes directly package such transactions into blocks without charging users Gas. However, to prevent spam transactions, Plasma has a basic throughput limit. At the same time, to avoid malicious transaction spamming, users also need to leave a small deposit on-chain, which acts as collateral: once the abuse threshold is triggered, this deposit will be automatically confiscated. This way, the "free" experience is preserved, and spam traffic is blocked.
Requests that go beyond simple transfers, such as more complex operations like calling multiple contracts at once, batch settlements, and institutional-level rapid settlements, will be recognized by the system and will require payment. The main source of income for Plasma nodes comes from here, along with the small fees collected from cross-chain asset transfers and custodial services, giving the entire network a self-sustaining capability. Because simple transfers are no longer charged, the pricing model can be more flexible: based on current on-chain estimates, thousands of free payments per second consume very low resources, allowing nodes to cover costs and maintain surplus with just a small amount of high-level business.
The "dual-layer framework" of Plasma supports this mechanism. The underlying layer periodically anchors the block state back to Bitcoin, outsourcing security to BTC's proof of work; the upper layer is directly compatible with EVM, allowing developers to easily migrate Ethereum contracts. By removing traditional gas calculations, the execution efficiency is even higher. A certain evaluation report mentioned that the improved consensus of Plasma can stably handle thousands of transactions with a single-core CPU during stress tests, and the rewards for nodes come entirely from those complex transactions.
So how does Plasma make money? The answer is already apparent.
First, enterprise-level "dedicated line" - If cross-border remittance companies or game publishers want to push transfers from millisecond-level to sub-millisecond level, they must enter the paid lane and pay a fixed USDT monthly fee to ensure bandwidth.
Second, contracts and batch settlement - DeFi protocols calling complex logic still require Gas fees, but the pricing unit has changed from ETH to USDT.
Third, bridging and custody - transferring assets from other chains to Plasma or redeeming from Plasma incurs a small exit tax, which goes into the Plasma treasury and is then distributed to nodes and the foundation according to the rules.
Fourth, governance token XPL inflation - validators stake XPL to earn block rewards, and a portion is reserved in the Plasma treasury to be auctioned over time for continuous subsidies of 0 gas payments for peer-to-peer USDT.
The combination of the four is sufficient to offset the network costs of free transfers and may even provide Tether with a whole new cash flow.
Assuming that Plasma can successfully take on the majority of USDT traffic currently running on TRON and Ethereum, the first direct income would be the majority of the on-chain transaction fees intercepted by TRON and Ethereum - the annual revenue could reach approximately 1 billion to 2 billion USD, plus enterprise services and cross-chain fees, the new income range is expected to reach 1.2 billion to 3 billion USD.
However, due to Plasma's exemption from regular USDT transfer fees, it is conservatively estimated that Plasma could bring Tether $1 billion in revenue in a year.
Moreover, Plasma may have other hidden benefits and ecological spillovers: for example, attracting new large-scale liquidity and project participation, collecting certain "taxes"; providing SDKs and enterprise node access, charging commercial fees for on-chain applications, etc.
Comparing this new cash leg with Tether's existing ledger makes it clearer: In 2024, of Tether's approximately $13 billion in revenue, $7 billion comes from government bond interest, $45 million from a 0.1% issuance/redemption fee, and nearly $6 billion from investment gains in Bitcoin, gold, and early projects. This means that Plasma could potentially increase Tether's annual profit by an additional 15% - 20%.
![Left hand Plasma right hand Stable, Tether's stablecoin empire expands])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-62430c9c14eebdb1e86d83bbf5eb5e29.webp(
Stable: USDT L1 dedicated chain tailored for institutions
After Plasma embraced the liquidity of these large holders on the chain and the developer ecosystem, Tether did not stop there. This month, a certain trading platform and the USDT unified liquidity protocol USDT0 support an L1 chain.