USAT Ditches Ethereum Mainnet for Celo, Because One L2 Simply Wasn't Enough

Tether announced Tuesday that USAT stablecoin has expanded to the Celo blockchain, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, marking the regulated digital dollar's first deployment beyond the Ethereum mainnet. Because apparently, one blockchain wasn't enough for Paolo Ardoino's stablecoin empire—now we're going multichain like it's a diet thing.

The launch brings USAT—a stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital and targeted at the U.S. market—to Celo, with Google Cloud providing infrastructure support alongside plans for the stablecoin to serve as a gas currency on the layer-2 network. That's right, folks, your stablecoin is now also paying for transactions. We are truly living in the future where money prints money to move money.

"More than 566 million people globally use USDT as a reliable way to access and move dollars, particularly in markets where traditional financial infrastructure falls short. Expanding USAT to Celo builds on that foundation by bringing regulated digital dollar infrastructure into one of the most active on-chain economies today," said Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino in a statement. Translation: we're going where the users are, and the users are apparently everywhere except traditional banks.

Celo brings significant mobile reach through Opera MiniPay's 14 million wallet users globally. Celo co-founder and CEO Rene Reinsberg called the launch "a powerful validation of the infrastructure we've spent years building," highlighting Tether's selection of Celo for its first layer-2 deployment for USAT following its initial January rollout on Ethereum. Nothing says "we made it" quite like getting picked by Tether for your first L2 test drive.

The technical implementation includes a mainnet faucet system enabling verified users to access USAT through privacy-preserving proof-of-humanity verification developed with Self and Google Cloud. Following deployment, Celo governance will begin the process to enable USAT as a gas currency on the network. Yes, you now need to prove you're human to get free money. The future is weird.

Stablecoin velocity has now doubled in the past two years, with coins changing hands an average of six times per month, Standard Chartered flagged in a note Tuesday morning. That's prompted the bank to revisit a key assumption behind its stablecoin market forecast. Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at the bank, said that's out of sync with the bank's longstanding forecast. Standard Chartered has predicted that the stablecoin market will reach $2 trillion in total market cap. Banks: finally paying attention to the fact that people actually use this stuff. Better late than never, we guess.

Deloitte performed the first USAT attestation report, released earlier this month, showing that the firm had $17.6 million in reserves—comprised of cash and U.S. Treasuries—backing about $17.5 million in tokens as of January 31. For those keeping score at home, that's a $100,000 buffer. Sleep well at night, USAT holders.

Tether's flagship USDT stablecoin, which leads the industry with an $184 billion market cap, has never had a full independent audit from one of the "Big Four" accounting firms. However, last week, Tether said that it had signed one of the firms for an audit, but did not reveal which firm would do it. A subsequent Financial Times report said KPMG would conduct the audit. The mystery audit is coming. Probably. Eventually. We've been here before, haven't we?

Tether also announced Thursday that it has launched its gold-backed token XAUT on BNB Chain, expanding access to the dominant tokenized gold product after the precious metal soared to new price heights in recent months. The listing connects BNB Chain's ecosystem to XAUT, which is the largest gold-backed token on the market with a nearly $2.5 billion market cap, as of this writing. That's nearly half the total tokenized gold market, which currently sits at $5.3 billion, per data from CoinGecko. Tether really said: why choose one chain