Tether

The company

Tether issues the largest stablecoin in existence and several smaller currency tokens alongside it, which is why it appears on more than one currency page here.

It is also the clearest case on this map of the gap between publishing and being examined. Tether publishes information about tokens in circulation on a frequent basis, and that is a real form of transparency about the token side. It is a different thing from an outside party counting the reserve, and conflating the two is the single most common mistake made about this issuer in either direction.

Sources: Tether transparency page, Tether

Reserve posture

Tether states that its tokens are backed one to one by its reserves and publishes circulation information frequently. DIA's disclosure ladder does not measure that statement. It measures what an outside party has examined, whether that party can be named, whether the document is retrievable, and what the document explicitly left outside its opinion.

That framing is deliberately narrow and it applies identically to every issuer here. A coin's rating on this map is not a verdict on whether it is sound. It is a record of what a reader can independently check, which is a smaller and more useful claim.

The smaller currency tokens carry their own version of this question. A reader looking for reserve reporting on a specific non dollar Tether token should confirm that the token appears on the issuer's transparency surface rather than assuming coverage extends from the flagship to everything sharing the brand.

Sources: Tether transparency page, Tether

What this map tracks

DIA reads Tether's tokens from contract state on the chains it indexes, and the flagship's spread across chains is the reason per chain reporting exists on this map at all. A single global figure hides where supply actually sits, and adding balances across bridged deployments can count the same dollars more than once.

One finding from our full seed sweep is worth recording because it changes how a page should be read. Not every token recorded against this issuer returns a live balance. A contract that reads zero is a fact about the token. A contract we have not read is a fact about our coverage. Those are different states and this map keeps them apart rather than rendering both as an empty cell.

Where a token here has been wound down, the correct reading of a zero is that it was read and found empty, not that the data is missing.

Sources: Tether transparency page, Tether

Common questions