At Tether, our mission is to empower our users. As highlighted in our new documentary, USDT isn’t just a cryptocurrency; it’s a lifeline for individuals across the globe. These local stories illustrate the power of USDT in peoples’ everyday lives, but we also want to showcase the huge scale of USDT adoption. In this Tether Insights, the first in a series that will quantify the uses and impact of Tether, we present the numbers on total USDT users.

A milestone in user adoption

USDT has seen significant adoption, with 330 million on-chain wallets and accounts, a proxy for users, ever receiving USDT by the end of Q3 2024 – that is equivalent to the population of the USA! And this does not include people that only use USDT on centralized platforms, of which there are several tens of millions more according to our partners.

The remarkable growth in users keeps on accelerating, with every quarter adding more users than the last. In fact, the last four quarters have seen an average increase of 9%. Q3 of 2024 was our best yet, welcoming 36.25 million users.

Defining a user

But what exactly constitutes a user? There are two main ways people engage with USDT:

• On-chain: this involves transferring USDT via the blockchain to a personal wallet or depositing it to an account on a centralized platforms; and
• Off-chain: this refers to buying or trading USDT on centralized platforms, where transfers are recorded within their systems rather than on the blockchain.

For this report, we’ll focus on on-chain wallets and accounts, which we can count from blockchain data. Now people can and do have multiple on-chain wallets and accounts, and many are used only briefly or infrequently – a topic we will explore in the future. So our estimate here of on-chain users is an upper bound. To learn more about how we measure on-chain users you can jump to the methodology at the end.

To get the complete picture, we should add in off-chain accounts, which are known only to centralized platforms. Our partners indicate there are several tens of millions of these accounts, meaning the true number of USDT users is even higher than what we present here.

Rapid growth is driven by Layer 2 chains and TON

So, where has all this growth come from? USDT is available across multiple blockchains, with the most significant usage on Tron, Binance Smart Chain, and Ethereum. However, the fastest percentage growth over the past year has come from Ethereum Layer 2 chains: Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon, as well as Avalanche and Solana. USDT has also recently launched on TON and Celo, with TON experiencing explosive growth by adding 3.3 million users, 1% of all USDT on-chain users, in just six months.

Conclusion

One of Satoshi’s greatest gifts is teaching us to question our assumptions – and another is the blockchain, which provides a transparent record that we can use to find answers to those questions. Tether is helping millions of people to access finance in innovative ways, but that impact often goes unnoticed as users span diverse countries and communities whose stories are not always heard. This inaugural Tether Insights uses blockchain data to reveal that USDT adoption is not only significant but also growing rapidly. Digital assets are increasingly integral to everyday life, and we look forward to exploring this theme further in upcoming Tether Insights.

Philip Gradwell, Head of Economics at Tether

Methodology

We source blockchain data from Chainalysis for the Ethereum, Tron, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Bitcoin blockchains, and from Artemis for the Solana, Base, Celo, and TON blockchains.

Chainalysis groups blockchain addresses by their best understanding of the controlling entity, for example all the addresses controlled by an exchange, in a process known as attribution and clustering. For blockchains where data is sourced from Chainalysis, a user is either a wallet, a cluster of addresses not attributed as a platform that receives USDT, or an on-chain account, a deposit address on an attributed platform that receives USDT.

On-chain accounts are often connected to off-chain accounts: it all depends on the depth of a user’s adoption. If you are just using USDT to trade on an exchange then you likely only have an off-chain account, but if you are also transferring USDT from the exchange with personal wallets and other businesses then you will have an on-chain account as well. 

Clustering removes addresses used for the internal operations of a wallet or platform, so estimates of users on these blockchains are more conservative than other estimates as these typically count individual addresses, rather than just the relevant addresses of a cluster.

For Solana, Base, Celo, and TON a user is an address that receives assets, as attributed and clustered data is not currently available for these blockchains. This results in a more generous estimate of user numbers.

Total on-chain users are the wallets and on-chain accounts that have ever received USDT. New on-chain users are the wallets and on-chain accounts that first received USDT in a time period.