Tether
KLEAR3 ResearchPublished 2026-08-25Updated
TronSolanaAvalanche
TONAptosUSDTTether, the token meant to be worth one dollar, is the third largest holding in crypto and the only one of the ten whose contract has no public code repository. We measured 88,306,390,736 of it on Ethereum, which is under half of what is reported in circulation.
What does Tether actually do?
Tether is a promise, written as a token. A company issues it, says each unit is backed by one dollar of assets, and takes it back when someone redeems. That is why it moves like a dollar on networks that have no dollars, and why everything depends on the issuer.
It exists because a blockchain cannot hold a bank account. Someone who wants to leave a volatile position without leaving the network needs something stable, and Tether is the oldest and largest answer to that need. Nearly every exchange prices its markets in it.
The structure is worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of a network with no issuer at all. Here there is a company, an address list it controls, and a redemption promise that only that company can honour. Nothing in the code enforces the dollar; the code moves tokens, the promise does the rest.
That is not a criticism, it is the design. But it means the questions worth asking are about the issuer, not the chain: what backs it, who verified that, and what happens if many holders redeem at once.
Source CoinGecko https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/coins/tether, read 2026-08-25
Is the code actually open?
There is no repository for the contract at all. The aggregator lists none, and a search across the issuer’s GitHub organisation, which holds 150 public repositories, returns only wallet modules. The only readable code is the bytecode we found deployed on chain.
That deserves care, because the obvious version of the sentence is wrong. It is not that the company publishes nothing: it publishes a hundred and fifty repositories, none of which is the token. So this is a choice about which code is public, not a company that avoids GitHub.
What can still be read is the deployed contract itself. We measured 11,075 bytes of bytecode at the address on Ethereum. Bytecode is machine instructions, not source: it proves something is deployed and can be inspected by specialists, and it is not what anyone means by open code.
The contrast inside this top ten is direct. The other large dollar token publishes its contract under an open licence. Same product, same promise, opposite answer on this question.
Source CoinGecko + GitHub API https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=org:tetherto+usdt+OR+stablecoin+OR+token, read 2026-08-25
No audit report exists to open, for the simple reason that there is no published code to audit. The company does publish a transparency page, which answered when we requested it. We did not read what it contains, so this page says nothing about reserves beyond the fact that the page exists.
Source Not examined, read 2026-08-25
Is anyone still working on it?
The question does not apply the way it does elsewhere on this site. With no repository for the contract, there is no commit history to count. A deployed token contract is also not something that gets rewritten: it is issued and redeemed, not shipped.
This is worth stating rather than leaving as an empty field. Our rating gives Tether zero on the code axis, and that zero measures an absence of published code, not an abandoned project. The token is used more heavily than anything else in this top ten.
Where activity would matter is on the issuer side: attestations, redemptions, banking relationships. None of that lives in a repository, and none of it was measured here.
Source CoinGecko + GitHub API https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=org:tetherto+usdt+OR+stablecoin+OR+token, read 2026-08-25
- We read the contract on chain
Where does it actually run?
On eleven chains, as eleven separate contracts. We measured the Ethereum one directly and found under half the reported circulating amount there. The rest is elsewhere, and sending to the wrong network destroys the transfer with no way back and no support line.
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding for a beginner, so it is worth being blunt. There is no such thing as sending Tether. There is sending Tether on a specific network, to an address on that network, and the token with the same name on another chain is a different contract entirely.
The measurement makes the scale of it concrete: 88,306,390,736 on Ethereum against 183,230,580,044 reported in circulation. Just under half. The other half moves on chains including TRON, which carries a large share of it.
Source ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com — eth_call totalSupply(), read 2026-08-25
TronSolanaAvalancheTONAptos
NEARCeloKavaTezosKlaytnEthereum contract read directly on a public node: total supply and deployed bytecode, at the block cited. The other ten chains come from the aggregator and were not read by us.
What the token actually does
It holds a dollar of value on a network that has none. It pays no yield, grants no vote and carries no rights beyond the redemption promise. Supply has no cap: it grows when the issuer issues and shrinks when it redeems.
The absence of a cap is a real difference from most of this list, and it follows from what the token is. A promise to hold a dollar cannot have a maximum without refusing new customers. The figure to watch is not a ceiling, it is what stands behind the outstanding amount.
That figure was not established here. The transparency page answered, we did not open it, and this page will not describe reserves it has not read. It is the one question worth more than everything else on this fiche, and it is the one we left open.
- What the token is forDirectly verified
- How many existDirectly verified
- Which contract is the official oneDirectly verified
- How new ones appearNot verified
- Who can change the rulesNot verified
KLEAR3 rating
We only rate what we have measured. On this project too few axes rest on a sourced fact, so no overall score comes out — a number built on gaps would read as a verdict on the protocol when it is a verdict on our own research.
Nothing measured yet on Open code · Business model
- Open codenot measured
What holds it back no public repository established · licence unresolved: readable but not reusable · no published release · no activity in 90 days
- Audits0
absence searched for: 20 firm indexes swept, 3,573 reports, none commissioned by the project
What holds it back no report in our registry · no report opened: we do not know what they found
- Business modelnot measured
What holds it back business model not established from a primary source
- Governance2
decided by decision-de-l-emetteur, with no vote
What holds it back no public proposal process among its 1 open repositories
- Token alignment1
supply measured, with no cap: nothing bounds issuance · circulating share known
What holds it back emission schedule unknown
- Maturity3
1 network verified by us · 11 networks in total
What holds it back date the code went public unknown
We rate the protocol: how it is built, how much of it can be checked, how its token lines up. Never an investment. A high score is not advice to buy, and a low one is not advice to sell.
What we could not establish
The reserves, and everything downstream of them. We confirmed the transparency page answers, and we did not read it. We also did not measure the ten non-Ethereum contracts, so their amounts here come from the aggregator rather than from a chain we queried.
Naming this is more useful than filling it badly. Anyone deciding whether to hold Tether is deciding on the reserves, so a page that guessed at them would be worse than one that admits the gap. What we can say is what we read: the contract exists, holds bytecode, and reports the amount cited above at the block cited above.
Frequently asked questions
Is Tether really backed by dollars?
We did not establish that, and we will not repeat what we have not read. The issuer publishes a transparency page, which answered when we requested it. Its contents were not opened in this campaign, so this page reports the page exists and nothing more.
What makes the question hard is that the answer cannot be read on the chain. The contract proves how many tokens exist; it proves nothing about what stands behind them. Those are two different measurements, and only the first is available to anyone with a node.
A reader who wants a view on this needs the attestations themselves: who produced them, on what date, over what perimeter, and under what standard. That is a real piece of work and it is not done by looking at a token balance.
Why does Tether have no public code repository?
We can report the fact and not the reason. The aggregator lists no repository, and a search of the issuer’s GitHub organisation, which holds 150 public repositories, returns only wallet modules and bridges.
The distinction matters because the shorter version misleads. This is not a company absent from GitHub; it is a company that publishes plenty and not this. The deployed bytecode remains readable on chain, which is not the same as source code.
For comparison inside this same top ten, the second largest dollar token publishes its contract under an open licence, with numbered releases. Same use, same promise, and a different answer to who may read the code. That difference says nothing about the reserves of either, and everything about what a reader can check alone. Only one of the two can be settled without trusting the issuer at all.
Is Tether on one network or several?
Eleven, each with its own contract address. That means the token you hold is defined by the network it sits on, and a transfer to an address on a different chain does not arrive.
We measured the Ethereum contract ourselves and found under half the reported circulating amount there. The rest sits on chains the aggregator lists and we did not read.
The practical rule for anyone moving it is short: check the network before the address. Exchanges label them, wallets label them, and the label is the part that decides whether the money arrives. It is the one field people skim past, and the only one with no recovery when it is wrong. Nothing about the ticker warns you, because the ticker is identical everywhere, on all eleven. Only the network name distinguishes them.
Read next: our Ethereum profile explains the network most of it sits on, and our Figure HELOC profile shows a different way of putting a real world claim on a chain.
Ask an assistant to summarise it and check what it claims.