Tether USDT

What USDT actually is on-chain

Tether is an ERC-20 deployed on Ethereum, at contract address 0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7. That address, not the ticker USDT, is what uniquely identifies this asset: anyone can deploy a second token calling itself USDT, but the contract is unforgeable. Verify it against etherscan.io before sending funds or approving a spend.

Because it lives on Ethereum, USDT is held in any EVM-compatible wallet, transfers are paid for in ETH rather than in USDT itself, and secondary liquidity sits in Uniswap-style AMM pools. Two consequences follow for anyone setting alerts: you need ETH in the same wallet to move the token at all, and a quoted price taken from a pool is a pool price — it includes slippage that an order-book quote would not.

Another asset tracked on this site also uses the ticker USDT: Nova Merged USDT (zkLink) (another network). The asset on this page is specifically the Ethereum deployment at 0xdac1…1ec7. These are unrelated tokens with separate contracts, separate supply and separate price histories — a price alert set on one of them says nothing about the others, and a ticker search is not enough to tell them apart.

For USDT the project publishes a whitepaper and an active account as @tether. That is a partial paper trail — enough to check claims against, not enough to audit. None of it is a quality judgement about the asset; it is simply what can be independently checked before the chart is worth looking at.

Where USDT sits in the market

Tether is ranked #3 by market capitalisation, in the very top of the table. At that size the binding constraints are not liquidity but custody, index membership and regulated venue access — books are deep enough that a retail-sized order almost never moves the printed quote, and the spread between two major venues is usually a few basis points. The trade-off is correlation: USDT is close to the market benchmark itself, so it responds to funding conditions and to flows into the asset class more than to project-level news.

CryptoPingAi is currently streaming 2 live USDT order books (Upbit, Bithumb). That is thinner coverage than a #3 ranking would normally imply — a move on one of these books is close to the whole market for USDT, with no deep second venue to arbitrage it back. One of them is a Korean won market, so the Kimchi-premium spread between the KRW and USDT quote is visible on this page.

USDT against its all-time high

Tether's record high is $1.32, set on 2018-07-24. That high sits in a range where whole-cent and whole-unit levels are genuinely traded, which makes them usable as alert thresholds if a quote returns. It was set 8 years ago. A peak that old describes a supply structure and a holder base that have almost certainly turned over since. We are not quoting a drawdown from it because no tracked venue is giving us a live USDT price — a stale or single-pool number would make that percentage look precise when it is not.

USDT across its historical range

The recorded range is comparatively narrow: 2.31x between $0.5725 and $1.32. Either the price history is short, or the asset is designed not to move.

The record low of $0.5725 was printed on 2015-03-02 — 12 years ago. We have no live quote to measure the current distance from it.

USDT supply structure

USDT has no hard cap. 189.69 billion USDT of a 195.16 billion total is in circulation (97.2%), leaving 5.47 billion held back. That overhang is modest but real — worth checking the unlock calendar before treating float as fixed.

What kind of asset USDT is

Tether is pegged to the US dollar, so the only price question that matters is whether the peg holds; trend and momentum readings on a dollar peg describe noise, not direction. Our dataset does not record which backing model this token uses, which is itself worth resolving before holding it: reserve-backed, collateral-backed and algorithmic pegs fail in very different ways and on very different timescales. At a fully diluted value above a billion dollars it is large enough that its peg is defended by deep secondary liquidity, not only by the issuer's redemption promise.

CoinGecko files USDT under 10 categories, including Stablecoins, USD Stablecoin, Solana Ecosystem, Avalanche Ecosystem, Near Protocol Ecosystem. CoinGecko also records deployments on Solana (3,129 tracked tokens), Avalanche (256 tracked tokens), NEAR (42 tracked tokens), so on-chain liquidity is split across several networks and the cheapest venue depends on which deployment you are trading.

How to set a Tether alert that is worth receiving

Tether is the ERC-20 at 0xdac1…1ec7 on Ethereum — quoted on 2 venues we stream — high dated 2018-07-24 — rank #3. On this profile the condition that carries signal is a peg-deviation band of roughly ±0.5% of par, with RSI ignored entirely.

Full alert-design method: thresholds, RSI/MACD and volume conditions →