A Comprehensive Understanding of Stable: Tether's On-Chain Sovereign Counterattack and the Ambition for a Stablecoin-Specific Chain

$825 million was sold out in 22 minutes, leaving ordinary users stunned in front of their screens — this seemingly successful fundraising revealed the brutal reality of resource competition in the encryption world.

“Why are there reminders everywhere, but as soon as I open the page, there are no funds left?” A user complained on platform X, expressing the frustration of many. In October 2025, the first phase of the Stable pre-deposit event was launched and sold out immediately, with $825 million in funds being snapped up in just 22 minutes.

On-chain data reveals a more shocking fact: $700 million worth of it was preemptively scooped up by a few whale addresses before the official announcement was made.

Behind this controversial event is Tether's profound planning for the future landscape of stablecoins. In the face of competition from the self-developed stablecoin by TRON, as well as the cost advantages of USDC on the Base network, Tether is no longer content with just being a stablecoin issuer, but has decided to build its own on-chain kingdom.

01 Value Capture Imbalance, Tether's On-Chain Predicament

“USDT contributed 98% of the on-chain transactions on the TRON network, but this has nothing to do with Tether”

The stablecoin industry giant Tether relies on the global circulation of USDT, earning an annual profit of 13 billion dollars just from government bond interest, making it one of the most profitable fintech companies in the world.

However, when reviewing the business model, Tether found that it had harvested enough profits from the issuance and management of USDT, but the real “on-chain economic revenue sharing” had not actually fallen into its hands.

The Gas fees charged by Ethereum every day have seen USDT contribute nearly $100,000, accounting for over 6% of the total Ethereum transaction fees. But that's not all—Tron is the ultimate stage for capturing the value of USDT.

According to the latest on-chain data, the transfer volume and Gas consumption of USDT on the Tron network account for over 98% of the entire public chain.

This means that the trading boom of TRON is almost entirely reliant on USDT “blood transfusions”. Each on-chain transfer of USDT incurs a transaction fee usually ranging from 0.3 to 8 dollars.

More intuitive data shows that the Tron network currently generates over $2.1 million in on-chain revenue daily, translating to an annualized income of up to $770 million, with the vast majority coming from the high-frequency transaction fees of USDT.

For Tether, this is a typical “value capture imbalance.” The issuance and branding of USDT have brought huge user traffic and industry-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 undermines Tether's strategic discourse power in the future on-chain payment and settlement network, but also causes it to lose initiative when facing new threats such as the self-developed stablecoin by TRON and even the diversion of traffic.

02 Chain Sovereignty Counterattack, the Emergence of Stable

If it is only satisfied with being the “super mint” of stablecoins, Tether's future value ceiling will be extremely limited

Tether's first step was quietly supporting a new chain called Plasma by the end of 2024. Initially, there were only a few announcements and several rounds of financing—Tether's parent company, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Framework, and other capital injected a total of 24 million USD.

In just two months, the valuation of Plasma was pushed to $500 million.

Plasma uses the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the security of UTXO while being directly compatible with EVM at the execution layer. Most importantly, all on-chain transactions can be paid for gas directly with USDT, and transfers of USDT are completely free.

However, Plasma is just the beginning. In 2025, the L1 chain Stable, supported by the USDT unified liquidity protocol USDT0, will be officially announced, with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino personally serving as the project advisor.

Unlike Plasma, which serves as a Layer 2 for Bitcoin, Stable is an independent Layer 1 chain. Although it also uses USDT as gas and offers free peer-to-peer USDT transfers, it targets a completely different audience: global financial institutions, enterprise settlements, large-scale clearing, on-chain corporate finance, and B2B cross-border transactions.

The technical design of Stable is highly targeted: it adopts an independent public chain architecture, supports EVM compatibility and sub-second transaction confirmations, and plans to launch a gas-free USDT0 transfer mode, while providing institutions with dedicated block space that can be applied for and compliant privacy trading support.

These features aim to lower the threshold for enterprises and end users to use blockchain payments, enhancing the efficiency of stablecoin transactions.

03 Pre-deposit Disputes, a Microcosm of Resource Competition

10 whale addresses have collectively deposited about 600 million USDT, and all funds come from the same wallet address

The first phase of the Stable USDT pre-deposit event quickly sparked huge controversy after its launch, with a large number of community users questioning the existence of serious “insider trading” operations.

According to the official timeline, Stable officially tweeted to announce the opening of pre-storage at 9:10 AM Beijing time, but on-chain data shows that someone had already deposited funds as early as 8:48, which is clearly inconsistent with the official timing.

The $825 million pre-deposit quota was largely “reserved” with $700 million before the public announcement. Among them, 10 whale addresses deposited approximately $600 million USDT in total, and all the funds came from the same wallet address, which was split and filled within 10 seconds.

Further analysis reveals that these funds were all withdrawn from BTSE CEX and then dispersed into different wallets for pre-deposit, suspected to be operated by the same capital group.

Relatively speaking, ordinary users have almost no participation space. A large number of users reported that after entering the official website for the first time, either the authorization failed, or the transaction could not be packaged for a long time, and by the time they saw the official tweet, there was only 0.13 USDT left on the page.

According to Dune data, the total presale event amounting to $825 million actually had only 273 addresses participating, with the participation rate of ordinary users being almost negligible.

It is worth noting that among all participating addresses, nearly 40 addresses have deposit amounts of less than 500 USDT, with extremely small deposits of 1 USDT, 3 USDT, 5 USDT, or even tens of USDT. The community sarcastically claims that these small amount addresses are merely props to inflate the number of participants, lacking any real sense of involvement.

04 Strategic Blueprint: Tether's On-Chain Empire Ambition

“Criticism aside, earning is still a must.” Despite the ongoing controversies, there is a clear strategic layout behind Stable.

Stable is not designed to be another generic public chain, but rather a high-performance Layer 1 public chain specifically built for USDT, aimed at providing a high-speed, low-cost, low-latency stablecoin trading network.

Unlike general-purpose public chains, Stable focuses on the payment and settlement functions of USDT, aiming to provide a cash-like user experience for USDT on the chain, suitable for scenarios such as cross-border payments, e-commerce payments, and corporate settlements.

Stable has received investments from well-known institutions including Tether's parent company, Hack VC, and Franklin Templeton, and has the official endorsement of Tether. These funds are primarily used for building network infrastructure and expanding the global USDT payment ecosystem.

From a broader perspective, Stable is a key component of Tether's “three-chain strategy”: Plasma addresses on-chain user experience, turning small transactions into large volumes with 0 Gas; Stable addresses institutional compliance, transforming large volumes into sustainable high profits through dedicated line clearing.

They share a common goal - to free USDT from being restricted by the fees of any public chain and to prevent it from being “taxed” by any single ecosystem.

The clues to the stable landing are hidden in Tether's recent intensive investments in bulk commodities. This spring, Tether invested in acquiring 70% of the shares of Latin American agricultural and renewable energy giant Adecoagro, and then announced that USDT would directly participate in the settlement of South American grain and oil, ethanol, and even crude oil.

Traditional bulk trade has long relied on bank wire transfers and letters of credit, with a single shipment often worth tens of millions of dollars, and funds “clearing” in the banking system can take several days; if this money is converted to on-chain USDT, the cross-border counterparties can almost release it in seconds.

05 Future Challenges, the Road Ahead for Stable is Long

Regulation, competition, and technology, three mountains pressing down

Despite the grand vision, the uncertainties faced by Stable are equally significant.

Regulation is the primary challenge. As innovation accelerates, regulatory agencies still have disagreements on how to treat yield-generating stablecoin products. The GENIUS Act, passed earlier this year, officially prohibits “yield stablecoins.”

At the same time, Tether's “black and gray attributes” are still being scrutinized under a magnifying glass by U.S. regulators: a Treasury report names Mexican drug trafficking groups that favor using USDT, and some legislators simply regard it as a negative example of encryption.

The competition pressure is equally immense. The competition in the stablecoin sector can be described as “brutal”: USDC and USDT hold an absolute dominant position, while new entrants like PYUSD (PayPal stablecoin) and FDUSD (Fidelity stablecoin) are backed by large institutions.

From the perspective of transaction cost, the advantage of TRON as a stablecoin settlement network is gradually weakening. Without purchasing and burning TRX, the current transaction fee on TRON even exceeds that of the traditionally expensive Bitcoin network, and is also higher than that of the Ethereum mainnet, Apots chain, and BNB chain.

This is not a good thing for USDT, as the cost of transferring USDC through the Base network is only $0.000409. Even the Circle Paymaster feature launched by Circle allows users to pay gas fees using USDC on the Arbitrum and Base networks.

In addition, Stable needs to prove that its stablecoin demand can exceed the “DeFi yield mining” scenario and possess sustainability.

It is worth mentioning that the second phase of the Stable pre-deposit activity is about to start, and the project team has promised to introduce mechanisms such as a deposit limit per wallet and a 24-hour countdown to prevent whale monopolization.

However, what may be more noteworthy for ordinary users is the pre-deposit activities related to centralized exchanges. Previously, Binance launched a deposit activity for Plasma (XPL). Since it involved depositing stablecoins, there was no principal loss, and the annualized return from selling XPL immediately after its launch reached as high as 79%.

The two chains have clear divisions of labor: Plasma addresses on-chain user experience, using 0 Gas to transform small transactions into large volumes; Stable addresses institutional compliance, using dedicated lines for settlement to turn large volumes into sustainable high profits. Their common goal is singular—allowing USDT to no longer be constrained by the fee rates of any public chain, nor to be “taxed” by any single ecosystem.

From daily remittances to tens of thousands of tons of soybeans, all dollar flows ultimately have to return to the ledger controlled by Tether itself, which is the ultimate point of the “chain sovereignty counterattack.”