USDT backers Tether Ltd. are bringing their namesake stablecoin to the proof-of-stake Algorand blockchain.
Tether declared as much in a July 17th blog post, with the firm explaining the move was only its latest expansionary flex to “add to [its] existing applications on Omni, Ethereum, Tron and EOS.”
Developed by MIT computer science professor and zero-knowledge proof pioneer Silvio Micali, Algorand uses what its builders call Pure PoS to achieve network consensus. The blockchain’s blocks are facilitated using a lottery process, and the system has been crafted to be extremely scalable.
Tether chief technical officer Paolo Ardoino said the company was enthusiastic to embrace the fledgling but cutting-edge platform:
“Extending Tether into the Algorand ecosystem is a fantastic opportunity for us to further contribute to blockchain interoperability and collaboration. Algorand is an excellent team very much aligned with ours; we are proud to take this next step with them. We are very excited about the potential this enables for other projects in the decentralised ecosystem and we eagerly await working closely with many of them in the future.”
Of course, with Algorand being so early on in its lifespan, it remains to be seen how popular its USDT ecosystem will ultimately prove compared to the traction of tether issued on other popular blockchains, e.g. Ethereum.
For their part, the Wednesday announcement shows Tether feels confident that demand for the long-embattled but ever popular stablecoin will indeed uptrend on the Pure PoS blockchain in the coming years.
On a somewhat related note, the news comes after Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance formally pivoted away from tether issued on Omni to Ethereum-based ERC20 tether tokens.
“Reason: the number of people depositing omni is low,” Binance chief executive officer Changpeng Zhao said at the time. “We follow user demand.”
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1146386559077240832
Most USDT Printings Planned, But a Recent One Wasn’t
On July 13th, Tether Ltd. accidentally printed five billion more USDT than it meant to.
The massive stablecoin misprint resulted from the firm as it was aiding crypto exchange Poloniex in swapping the trading venue’s Omni-based USDT to tether issued on the Tron blockchain.
In the aftermath of the mistake, Tether CTO Ardoino confirmed the accident occurred as a result of an “issue with the token decimals.”
Unfortunately we have to play with different toolchains across multiple blochains and sometimes issues happen. We're working anyway to prevent this from happening in the future. @Tether_to https://t.co/QxAF0QorY5
— Paolo Ardoino ???? (@paoloardoino) July 13, 2019
In other words, the massive over-issuance apparently came from the Tether team inputting an incorrect token creation sum and still going forward with the transaction.
The accidental USDT were promptly burned, but the incident was yet another reminder that it’s important to be meticulous during transactions with the UX as it is in the fledgling cryptoeconomy.
Algorand Raised $60 Million in Recent Offering
Last month, the Algorand Foundation ran its first token offering for 25 million “algo” tokens via a Dutch auction, with the auction transactions having been processed by the Algorand blockchain itself.
Due to the structure of Dutch auctions, the algo token’s price was started off in the sale at $10 USD per token. As the offering progressed, that price slid down to $2.40 each.
$60 million was raised in the round altogether, which gives the algo a starting implied market capitalization of approximately $24 billion — at least when projected against the token’s completed 2024 token supply of 10 billion.
The Algorand Foundation is set to auction off another 600 million algo in the coming months, and the token’s valuation will fluctuate once it hits more exchanges. While things are still early, there’s no telling where the project’s market cap goes from here.
Notably, the Algorand mainnet launched with the start of the inaugural algo auction. “The launch of MainNet and the successful first auction usher in a new era of global economics,” the project’s builders boldly claimed.