Tether will launch a recovery tool to transfer USDT between blockchains
Major stablecoin issuer Tether UST has launched a recovery tool to move its Tether (USDT) stablecoin between different blockchains amid hitting a $100 billion market capitalization.
Tether announced the launch of a blockchain recovery plan on March 4 to ensure stable access to USDT after one of the many blockchain networks used for USDT transactions suffered an outage.
According to data from Tether, USDT is live on 14 blockchains as of March 4, including Tron, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Omni. Tron and Ethereum are the two largest blockchains for USDT, accounting for 51% and 43% of the total USDT.
Despite its heavy reliance on blockchains such as Tron and Ethereum, USDT is “independent of the blockchain,” said Tether's latest announcement, stressing that the blockchain “serves only as a transport layer.”
To address the risk of a blockchain becoming unresponsive, unreliable, or unusable, Tether has established its Public Recovery Tool, which allows users to migrate USDT between blockchains. The organization stated:
“Users can verify ownership of their address on a non-responsive blockchain and a receiving address on another supported blockchain, and Tether transfers USDT between them.”
According to the announcement, affected USDT users can initiate the migration process using the web interface or command line tools. The process involves secretly signing a migration request to verify ownership of Tether tokens, which are available through browser extension wallets like MetaMask and hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor.
Additionally, the command-line interface allows users to directly enter their private key, which allows them to sign the required message using an open-source script on their local machine, the announcement notes.
Related: WSJ faces defamation lawsuit related to Tether-Bitfinex article
Cointelegraph reached out to Tether for comment but had not yet received a response at the time of publication.
The launch of Tether's recovery tool comes as USDT hits a milestone in terms of its market value, with USDT's market cap hitting $100 billion for the first time in history on March 4.
At the time of writing, USDT is in third place by market capitalization, followed by Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), with a value of $1.4 trillion and $442 billion, respectively, according to data from CoinGecko.
In contrast, USDT is the largest currency by daily transaction volume, as $132 billion in crypto trades and transactions were processed using USDT as of March 5. BTC and ETH trail USDT's trading volumes with $82 billion and $33 billion in daily transactions. respectively.
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