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.

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Tether

# Tether Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

Revenue measures the portion of fees that Tether retains from the yield generated by its reserve assets. The interest income earned on the assets backing issued stablecoins, such as Tether USD, Euro Tether, and Tether Gold, is reflected by this metric before operating expenses are deducted. Because these earnings are not distributed to supply-side participants, 100% of the generated interest fees are retained as protocol revenue. This income is primarily driven by holdings in US Treasury bills, secured loans, and other yield-bearing reserve assets.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: `Issue`, `Mint`, `Redeem`, `DestroyedBlackFunds`, and `DestroyedBlockedFunds` events from `Tether USD`, `Euro Tether`, and `Tether Gold` contracts, `Transfer` events from `Jetton` contracts, `Mint` and `Burn` events from `Tether USD` contracts, and token balance changes from Solana accounts, covering Ethereum, Tron, Avalanche, Solana, and 3 other chains
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for assets, Federal Reserve Bank of New York effective federal funds rates, and scraped reserve breakdown data from Tether transparency reports

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Outstanding supply tracking

- **Purpose**: Calculate the circulating supply of Tether stablecoins across supported chains.
- **Logic**: Mint and burn events are aggregated across chains to determine the total issued supply. For Ethereum, Tron, Avalanche, and Celo, `Issue`, `Mint`, `Redeem`, and destruction events are parsed. For TON, `Transfer` events to and from the treasury address are tracked. For Aptos, `Mint` and `Burn` events are parsed. For Solana, token balance changes are tracked across accounts, excluding known Tether-owned accounts. Treasury balances are calculated for specific custody accounts and subtracted from the total minted amounts to determine the net outstanding supply of Tether USD, Euro Tether, and Tether Gold.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` (timing), `amount` (supply quantities), `token_address` (asset identification)

### Component B: Historical interest revenue estimation for Tether USD

- **Purpose**: Estimate daily interest revenue generated from reserves prior to programmatic reporting.
- **Logic**: For periods before November 28, 2024, the interest-bearing portion of the outstanding supply is estimated at 80% of the total outstanding supply for Tether USD and Tether USDT0. This interest-bearing supply is multiplied by the daily historical US Treasury Bill rate (carried forward for weekends and holidays) and divided by 365 to calculate daily estimated interest revenue.
- **Key fields**: `outstanding_supply` (circulating supply), `tbill` (historical Treasury Bill rate)

### Component C: Programmatic reserve-based revenue calculation for Tether stablecoins

- **Purpose**: Calculate daily interest revenue based on scraped reserve breakdowns and real-time interest rates.
- **Logic**: For periods starting November 28, 2024, reserve breakdown data is programmatically scraped from Tether transparency reports. The balances of yield-generating reserve lines (such as US Treasury Bills and secured loans) are extracted. These balances are multiplied by the daily effective federal funds rate from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and divided by 365 to determine daily interest revenue.
- **Key fields**: `amount` (reserve line balances), `rate_percentage` (effective federal funds rate)

### Component D: Revenue aggregation and chain allocation

- **Purpose**: Aggregate total revenue and allocate it proportionally across chains.
- **Logic**: Daily revenue is aggregated across all products. For periods with manual transparency report configurations, the annualized revenue is divided by 365. Total daily revenue is allocated to individual chains proportionally based on each chain's share of the total outstanding supply of Tether stablecoins. All values are normalized by decimal precision and converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds.
- **Key fields**: `fees` (calculated interest revenue), `outstanding_supply` (chain-specific supply), `price_usd` (asset price)

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

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

Tether

Revenue

Revenue

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Chain breakdown