Tether’s stablecoin set to land on Polkadot and Kusama

The launch of parachain shards on Polkadot will also mean the release of Tether on the network.

Polkadot and Kusama users will benefit from a direct integration with Tether’s USDT when common good parachains launch. As announced by Tether on Tuesday, the stablecoin will launch both on Polkadot and Kusama, its cousin network.

Tether is the oldest stablecoin to reach significant adoption and it has recently surpassed $40 billion in circulating supply. Though there have been concerns in the past as for its reserve status, the company recently committed and followed through with periodic reserve audits.

The timing of Tether’s release on Polkadot depends on its roadmap and the activation of parachains, the “shards” within the Polkadot network. As Tether’s chief technology officer, Paolo Ardoino, told Cointelegraph:

“Tether will likely launch on the first parachain available, StateMint. We expect StateMint to be the first common goods parachain.”

Common good parachains are a recent proposal within the Polkadot network to provide a neutral ground for building critical features for the network as a whole. Most “normal” parachains are launched by external developers, and sometimes they may overlap in function and become effective competitors.

Building on a common goods parachain means that the stablecoin maintains neutrality within the wider network, while making its token available in any other parachain thanks to Polkadot’s cross-shard communication framework.

Before deploying on Polkadot, Tether will launch on Kusama, which will itself launch parachains at least a few weeks before Polkadot. Kusama is a “canary network” of Polkadot, a middle ground between a testnet and an independent blockchain. Kusama is a fully functional network that carries economic value, though it is expected to lead the way in implementing new protocol upgrades.

Tether is one of the stablecoins with the widest reach across blockchains, as Polkadot and Kusama add to an already significant list of adopters. These include Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tron (TRX), EOS, Solana (SOL) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Tether is also supporting a number of layer-two solutions such as zkRollups and Liquid Network. The decision to release Tether on Polkadot was apparently done with DeFi in mind, Ardoino added:

“Our integration with Polkadot serves to support the decentralized finance ecosystems that are growing across blockchains. There has been notable development in Web 3 technologies and we look forward to helping them unlock the internet of value.”