The news of USDT (Tether) coming to Bitcoin and Lightning by way of Taproot Property has been met with numerous reactions.
Some imagine it’s good for Bitcoin (most, really, primarily based on a small survey I carried out on X; sure, I do know the pattern dimension isn’t giant sufficient for the outcomes to be important. I’M SHARING IT ANYWAY), whereas others aren’t so enthused about it.
Tether (USDT) on Bitcoin and Lightning is:
(Please share why within the feedback and please RT after you vote.)
— Frank Corva (@frankcorva) February 13, 2025
“Others” consists of me — I’m not so enthused about it.
That mentioned, I’ve tried to be open-minded.
I even not too long ago profiled Jesse Shrader, the co-founder and CEO of Amboss, an organization that gives clever cost infrastructure for funds revamped Lightning, who’s a proponent of USDT on Bitcoin and Lightning, in efforts to see what I may be lacking about the advantages of having the ability to transact with digital U.S. {dollars} over Lightning.
In my interview with Shrader, he made the next factors:
- The proliferation of USDT has confirmed that there’s a requirement for U.S. {dollars} globally
- USDT is an enormous cost mechanism; it processed over $10 trillion in funds in 2024, greater than MasterCard, and a few share of these funds will now be revamped Lightning
- USDT will deliver extra liquidity to the Lightning Community, which can assist the community develop and deal with greater funds
From a enterprise perspective, it’s exhausting to argue that the above aren’t good causes to deliver USDT to Lightning. And, as somebody who believes that folks needs to be free to make use of no matter cash they need, I am unable to argue with them when them via a sensible lens.
Nonetheless, I do imagine that bringing USDT to Bitcoin and Lightning comes at a worth.
One dimension of that worth is technical, whereas the opposite is philosophical.
On the technical stage, operating USDT over Bitcoin and Lightning doubtlessly places Bitcoin’s safety in danger.
If we see one other Bitcoin exhausting fork akin to the one we noticed in the course of the Blocksize War, bigger economic nodes on the Bitcoin community, just like the one operated by Coinbase, which manages a lot of the bitcoin that backs the U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs, might choose to help the “Tether fork” of the community, which might additionally embody different adjustments to the community that would jeopardize Bitcoin’s safety in the long term.
In different phrases, if the likes of Coinbase, Tether and another main gamers within the Bitcoin area help and push for the “Tether fork,” different main financial nodes will seemingly observe go well with.
What’s extra, everybody utilizing USDT on Bitcoin and Lightning would additionally seemingly help that aspect of the fork, as a result of the USDT that is still on the chain of the non-”Tether fork” will seemingly be nullified.
Lyn Alden wrote about this in her essay “Proof-Of-Stake And Stablecoins: A Blockchain Centralization Dilemma.”
Within the piece she acknowledged “custodians can nullify the worth of all stablecoins on whichever aspect of the fork they don’t view as the right one.”
Granted, Alden was referring to sensible contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana that rely closely on DeFi, which stablecoins are a serious part of, when she wrote this, however the identical would apply to Bitcoin. (Alden was right on this declare, as we noticed when Ethereum shifted from a Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism throughout 2022’s “The Merge.”
Put up-Merge, stablecoins issuers like Circle and Tether solely continued to again the tokenized U.S. {dollars} on Ethereum, and never EthereumPoW (ETHW), the older chain that continued operating the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm.)
The identical kind of state of affairs might play out with Bitcoin within the occasion of a sequence cut up, giving Tether an inordinate quantity of energy over Bitcoin.
My different cause for not liking USDT on Bitcoin is a philosophical one.
Bitcoin, which was launched into the world within the wake of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, was created as a substitute for the U.S. greenback.
On the time, the greenback was being printed en masse (i.e., devalued) to bail out the identical banks that precipitated the disaster.
Bitcoin, cash that may’t be printed on the whim of a authorities or central financial institution, was created to compete with the U.S. greenback, to not assist buoy it.
Bringing USDT, a mechanism the U.S. authorities makes use of to prop up U.S. greenback hegemony around the globe, to Bitcoin feels morally flawed to me — and I’m not right here for it.
So, on a sensible stage, I get why some are in favor of USDT coming to Bitcoin and Lightning. I simply assume that many are lacking the larger image in that Bitcoin has doubtlessly each been put in a susceptible place and has had a part of its worth proposition overshadowed (albeit perhaps simply briefly) in consequence.
This text is a Take. Opinions expressed are completely the writer’s and don’t essentially mirror these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
