USDT: The Crypto That Is Not Supposed to Make You Rich — So Why Does the World Need It?
If It Never Goes Up, Why Does the World Want $200 Billion of It?
There is something intellectually strange about stablecoins.
Bitcoin is easy to understand, even if you dislike it. You buy Bitcoin because you believe that tomorrow somebody might pay more for it. Ethereum can be interpreted as both an asset and infrastructure. Meme coins reduce the proposition almost to its purest speculative form.
But Tether’s USD₮ is different.
You buy one USDT for approximately one US dollar. If the system works exactly as intended, one year later it should still be worth approximately one dollar.
No capital gain.
No revolutionary investment thesis.
No dividend paid to the ordinary holder.
No interest merely for owning the token.
The best possible outcome, apparently, is that nothing happens to its price.
And yet by the end of 2025 Tether reported a USD₮ market capitalization of $187.3 billion, approximately 534.5 million estimated users, 139.1 million on-chain holders and $4.4 trillion transferred on-chain during Q4 alone. (Tether)
That apparent contradiction is the right place to start.
Because stablecoins may have been marketed as a crypto innovation, but their extraordinary growth tells us at least as much about the deficiencies of conventional money and banking as it does about blockchain.
The paradox: why buy an asset designed not to appreciate?
Imagine two assets.
Asset A can appreciate 50%, collapse 60%, recover 100% and collapse again.
Asset B is engineered to remain at $1.
For an investor seeking capital gains, Asset A is obviously more interesting.
But now change the question.
Suppose you live in a country where your national currency loses 30%, 50% or 100% of its purchasing power against the dollar.