The team of the stablecoin issuer warned about this a few minutes before the start of the process on its Twitter account

​Tether burns 2 billion USDT in one transaction

07.02.2023 - 15:00

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2 min

What’s new? On February 7, Tether burned 2 billion USDT stablecoins on the Ethereum network in one transaction. The issuer’s team warned about the withdrawal of coins accumulated in the treasury wallet as part of inter-network swaps minutes before the process began on its Twitter account. The USDT total supply will not change during the burning, Tether warned.

Cryptocurrency burning is the process of removing a certain number of tokens from circulation, after which they become permanently inaccessible. Often burning is carried out in order to increase the rate of an asset or prevent it from inflation. Burning can be done by sending tokens to a wallet without a private key, by conducting a hard fork, using special software, or using algorithms that destroy some of the funds during transactions.

What is known about Tether? It is the largest stablecoin issuer in the cryptocurrency market. The centralized stablecoin USDT, which is pegged to the US dollar, ranks third in the overall ranking of cryptocurrencies with a capitalization of $68,26 billion, according to aggregator CoinGecko as of February 7.

In 2022, Tether overtook traditional payment systems Visa and Mastercard in terms of transaction volume. It processed $18,2 trillion in transactions, while Visa and Mastercard processed $14,1 trillion and $7,7 trillion, respectively.

On the night of January 19-20, Tether froze an Ethereum address with 5 million USDT in its account. The company did not provide details on who owns the address or the reason for the freeze.

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