Users deposit funds into Tether account and receive USDT at a 1:1 rate.

Tether is a financial technology company that is the principal architect of USDT - full-reserve fiat stablecoin that bring US dollar liquidity on-chain.

Tether is a private company owned by the Hong Kong-registered iFinex Inc.

twitter

website

Stablecoin issuers

Tether

# Tether Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

Fees is measured as the estimated economic value generated by Tether's reserve assets backing its issued stablecoins, primarily Tether USD. This economic value is generated from the underlying reserve portfolio, which includes US Treasury bills and other yield-generating assets. By tracking these fees, the overall revenue-generating capacity of the stablecoin issuer is quantified. The outstanding supply of Tether USD and other stablecoins is accounted for, with historical treasury rates and scraped reserve yields applied to estimate total fees.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: `Mint`, `Issue`, `Redeem`, `DestroyedBlockedFunds`, and `DestroyedBlackFunds` events from `Tether USD`, `Euro Tether`, and `Tether Gold` contracts, `Transfer` events from `Jetton` contracts, `Deposit`, `Withdraw`, and `Burn` events from `fungible_asset` and `Tether USD` contracts, and asset balance changes, covering Ethereum, Avalanche, Tron, Solana, and 3 other chains
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for assets, historical US Treasury bill rates, scraped reserve breakdown reports from Tether, and effective daily interest rates from the New York Fed

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Tether USD, Euro Tether, and Tether Gold outstanding supply tracking

- **Purpose**: Calculate the daily outstanding supply of Tether USD, Euro Tether, and Tether Gold across all supported blockchains
- **Logic**: Daily mints and burns are aggregated across supported chains. For EVM chains and Tron, `Mint` and `Issue` events are summed, and `Redeem`, `DestroyedBlockedFunds`, and `DestroyedBlackFunds` events are subtracted. For TON, transfers to and from the treasury address are tracked. For Aptos, `Deposit`, `Withdraw`, and `Burn` events are parsed. For Solana, asset balance changes are tracked for non-Tether-owned accounts. Treasury balances are subtracted to determine the net outstanding supply, which is then filled forward daily.
- **Key fields**: `amount`, `block_timestamp`, `token_address`

### Component B: Tether USD historical fee estimation

- **Purpose**: Estimate daily fees generated during the historical period prior to November 28, 2024
- **Logic**: An assumption is applied where 80% of the outstanding supply of Tether USD is treated as interest-bearing. This interest-bearing supply is multiplied by the daily US Treasury bill rate, which is sourced from historical rates and filled forward for weekends and holidays, and then divided by 365 to calculate the daily fee estimate.
- **Key fields**: `outstanding_supply`, `tbill`, `timestamp`

### Component C: Tether USD programmatic and transparency-based fee calculation

- **Purpose**: Calculate daily fees using scraped reserve reports and official interest rates from November 28, 2024 onwards
- **Logic**: For the transitional period between July 1, 2024, and November 27, 2024, manual transparency report data is utilized, where annual reserve amounts are multiplied by a fixed rate and divided by 365. From November 28, 2024 onwards, reserve balances for yield-generating assets are programmatically extracted from scraped Tether reserve reports. These balances are divided by 365 and multiplied by the effective daily interest rate scraped from the New York Fed to determine the daily programmatic fees.
- **Key fields**: `amount`, `rate_percentage`, `timestamp`

### Component D: Chain-level fee allocation and USD conversion

- **Purpose**: Allocate the calculated daily fees to individual chains and normalize to USD
- **Logic**: The total daily fees are allocated to individual chains proportionally based on each chain's share of the total outstanding supply of Tether USD. All calculated fee amounts are normalized by decimal precision and converted to USD using end-of-day asset price feeds.
- **Key fields**: `fees`, `outstanding_supply`, `price_usd`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

Tether

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown