Tether’s mission is to empower its users. As highlighted in our new documentary, USDT is more than just a cryptocurrency. It is a lifeline for individuals all over the world. These local stories show the power of USDT in people’s daily lives, but we also want to showcase the huge scale of USDT implementation. This Tether Insights is the first in a series quantifying the use and impact of Tether, providing figures for total USDT users.
Milestones in user adoption
USDT is being heavily adopted, with 330 million on-chain wallets and accounts representing users receiving USDT by the end of Q3 2024. This is equivalent to the population of the United States. This also does not include those who only use USDT on centralized platforms, which according to our partners is in the tens of millions more.
The impressive growth in user numbers continues to accelerate, with more users added each quarter than the previous year. In fact, the past four quarters have seen an average increase of 9%. The third quarter of 2024 was its best result ever with 36.25 million users.
User definition
But what exactly are users? There are two main ways to participate in USDT.
On-chain: This involves transferring USDT via blockchain to a personal wallet or depositing it into an account on a centralized platform. Off-chain: This refers to buying or trading USDT on a centralized platform where the transfer is recorded within the system rather than on the blockchain.
This report focuses on on-chain wallets and accounts that can be counted from blockchain data. Currently, people can and do own multiple on-chain wallets and accounts, many of which are only used for short periods of time or infrequently. We will consider this in the future. Therefore, the on-chain user estimate here is an upper bound. To learn more about how we measure on-chain users, jump to the methodology at the end.
To get the full picture, you need to add off-chain accounts that only the centralized platform knows about. Our partners suggest there are tens of millions of these accounts. This means that the actual number of USDT users is even higher than shown here.
Rapid growth is driven by layer 2 chain and TON
So where did this growth come from? USDT is available on multiple blockchains, most commonly used on Tron, Binance Smart Chain, and Ethereum. However, the fastest growth over the past year has come from Ethereum Layer 2 chains: Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Avalanche and Solana. USDT was also recently launched on TON and Celo, and TON has experienced explosive growth, adding 3.3 million users, or 1% of all USDT on-chain users, in just 6 months.
conclusion
One of Satoshi’s greatest gifts was that he taught us to question our assumptions. And the other is blockchain, which provides a transparent record that can be used to find answers to those questions. Tether is helping millions of people access finance in innovative ways, but our users span diverse countries and communities, and their stories are not always heard. often goes unnoticed. In this first Tether Insights, we use blockchain data to reveal that USDT adoption is not only significant, but growing rapidly. Digital assets have become increasingly integral to our daily lives, and we look forward to further exploring this theme in future Tether Insights.
Philip Gladwell, Head of Economics, Tether
methodology
Blockchain data for Ethereum, Tron, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Bitcoin blockchains is sourced from Chaina Analysis, and blockchain data for Solana, Base, Celo, and TON blockchains is sourced from Artemis.
Chainaosis groups blockchain addresses together to best understand the controlling entity (for example, all addresses controlled by an exchange) in a process known as attribution and clustering. For blockchains where data is sourced from Chainaracy, the user can be either a wallet, a cluster of addresses that are not attributed as a platform that receives USDT, or an on-chain account that is a depositing address on an attributed platform that receives USDT .
On-chain accounts are often connected to off-chain accounts, and it all depends on the depth of user adoption. If you’re just using USDT to trade on an exchange, you may only have an off-chain account, but if you’re transferring USDT from an exchange to a personal wallet or other company, You will also have an on-chain account.
Clustering removes addresses used for internal operations of a wallet or platform, so estimates of users on these blockchains typically count individual addresses and not just associated addresses in a cluster, so they are less likely to be counted than others. is more conservative than the estimate of .
For Solana, Base, Celo, and TON, the user will be the address to receive the asset, as attributed and clustered data is not currently available on these blockchains. This results in a more generous estimate of the number of users.
Total on-chain users are wallets and on-chain accounts that have received USDT to date. New on-chain users are wallets and on-chain accounts that first receive USDT within a period of time.
