Bid farewell to platform taxes: USDT as native Gas, Tether Empire lays a new cornerstone

Tether has launched the first Layer 1 network "Stable" with USDT as the native Gas, and through the "dual-chain parallel" strategy, it has laid out two public chains: Plasma and Stable, intending to break free from dependence on platforms such as Ethereum and TRON, addressing issues of value spillover and platform risk.

Written by: Luke, Mars Finance

A seemingly ordinary roadmap announcement is stirring up a deep and unfathomable undercurrent in the crypto world. In early July, the first Layer 1 network "Stable" with USDT as its native Gas released its three-phase development plan. On the surface, this is just another new project trying to carve out a share in the crowded public blockchain space. However, as we peel back the fog and connect this clue with Tether's recent series of seemingly unrelated layouts—mysterious development teams, another Bitcoin sidechain called "Plasma", and CEO Paolo Ardoino's subtle statements amid regulatory storms—a much grander and more intricate strategic picture is slowly unfolding than imagined.

This is not just a simple product launch, but a fundamental strategic shift for the stablecoin giant Tether. This company, which has built a hundred billion empire by issuing "digital dollars" on "foreign territories" such as Ethereum and TRON, is now quietly initiating an "independence movement." It is no longer satisfied with merely being a "super application" on other blockchains, but aims to step in itself and create its own financial infrastructure—the world's financial track.

The core issue of this conspiracy is: why would a company that extracts billions of dollars in profit each year through its existing model choose to disrupt the pattern that made it successful? What kind of internal pressure and external threats are forcing it to transform from a light asset "application layer" player to a heavy asset "infrastructure layer" titan? Its meticulously designed "dual chain parallel" strategy also reveals Tether's ultimate ambition to dominate the global digital finance.

Trillion Dollar "Platform Tax"

Tether's motivation stems from the shiny yet exceptionally fragile "Achilles' heel" in its business model. Its success is essentially a parasitic win-win. USDT, as the hard currency of the crypto world, has brought massive trading activities and users to public chains like Ethereum, particularly TRON, becoming the cornerstone of their ecological prosperity. However, Tether itself resembles a non-sovereign "tenant," residing on someone else's land and paying a high "rent" for it.

The "rent" is not paid directly, but is instead appropriated by the platform in a more insidious way—value spillover. The daily settlement volume of USDT exceeds 100 billion USD, with the vast majority of the traffic carried by TRON. Data shows that the circulation of USDT on the TRON network has surpassed 80 billion USD, accounting for half of the total supply of USDT, with an average daily transfer amount reaching 21.5 billion USD. These astronomical trading activities have contributed huge transaction fee revenue to the TRON network, but not a single cent will flow into Tether's pockets. This is the core dilemma faced by Tether: it creates value but cannot capture value. All ecological dividends are "taxed" by the underlying infrastructure platform.

The deeper crisis lies in platform risk. This deep reliance tightly grips the lifeline of Tether by its 'landlord'. Once the platform's policies change, Tether will face the danger of having its foundation pulled away. This concern is not unfounded; there are signs that TRON is attempting to break away from its singular dependence on USDT and is beginning to support its own stablecoin USD1 associated with the Trump family. This is tantamount to cultivating a direct competitor within its most important distribution channel. Furthermore, the continuous increase in transaction fees on the TRON network is eroding its core advantage as a low-cost settlement network. All of this points to a clear conclusion: Tether's move to create its own infrastructure is less about an active offensive to expand territory and more about a defensive counterattack to break free from strategic constraints and mitigate survival risks. It must establish its own sovereign territory.

Dual-track counterattack: two public chains, one grand strategy

Tether's counterattack is not a last-ditch effort, but a meticulously calculated "dual-track" strategy. While the "Stable" network is emerging, another project called "Plasma" has also received substantial support from Tether's upper management and its affiliated company Bitfinex. These two projects appear independent, but in reality, they complement each other, targeting different segments of the institutional market and together forming the left and right arms of Tether's infrastructure landscape.

Plasma: A Financial Fortress Anchored to Bitcoin

The positioning of Plasma is extremely clear: a dedicated financial layer born for large-scale, high-security stablecoin settlements. Its core architecture functions as a Bitcoin sidechain, periodically anchoring its state roots on the Bitcoin mainnet, thereby inheriting Bitcoin's unparalleled security and finality. This is highly attractive to traditional financial institutions that prioritize security, such as banks, sovereign funds, and large multinational corporations. Its functional design fully serves the positioning of a "settlement fortress": providing zero-fee USDT peer-to-peer transfers, supporting direct payment of Gas in BTC or USDT, and being fully compatible with EVM. Plasma's strategic goal is to precisely capture high-value B2B payments, cross-border remittances, and commodity trade settlements from TRON and Ethereum.

Stable: The Highway to Future Finance

Unlike Plasma's specialization, the ambition of the "Stable" network is much broader. It is designed as a fully functional, independent Layer 1, aiming to become the "highway" of next-generation on-chain finance. Its grand three-phase roadmap clearly outlines its path to ultimate performance: from using USDT as the native Gas and achieving sub-second finality as the base layer, to introducing "optimistic parallel execution" technology for a significant enhancement of throughput in the experience layer, and finally upgrading to a consensus mechanism based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to push speed and resilience to the limits. The target customers of the "Stable" network are institutions that require high-performance, highly customizable infrastructure, such as DeFi hedge funds, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization platforms, and more.

This set of "combined punches" reflects Tether's deep insights into the institutional market. It does not naively believe that a single chain can meet everyone's needs. Instead, it provides tailored solutions for a variety of institutions, from the most conservative banks to the most aggressive DeFi funds, by offering two different underlying infrastructures with distinct risk-return characteristics and functional focuses.

Ghosts in the Machine: Unveiling the Puppet Masters Behind Tether

A core contradiction lies ahead: Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino has repeatedly stated in public interviews that "there will be no Tether chain." However, a vast infrastructure ecosystem that centers absolutely around Tether is rising rapidly. Behind this seemingly contradictory situation is a carefully designed organizational structure aimed at achieving "strategic control" and "legal separation."

There are several key roles in this architecture, collectively playing the "ghosts in the machine," driving the construction of the empire behind the scenes:

• Bitfinex: As a sister company of Tether, it is a major capital provider and project incubator, leading investments in Plasma and Stable, thereby avoiding direct financial involvement from Tether.
• USDT0: This is the technical hub of the entire strategy. It is built on the LayerZero OFT standard and serves as a bridge connecting Tether's existing circulation system with emerging proprietary blockchains through a "lock-mint" mechanism, ensuring unified liquidity.
• Everdawn Labs: This mysterious software development company registered in the British Virgin Islands is the actual manager and operator of the USDT0 protocol. It is highly likely to be the real development team behind the "Stable" network, as well as an important technical partner of Plasma.

The four-party structure consisting of "Tether (brand and liquidity) - Bitfinex (capital) - Everdawn Labs (technology) - USDT0 (protocol)" perfectly explains Ardoino's "contradictory" statements. Legally speaking, Tether itself does not directly operate a public chain. However, through this power network composed of affiliated companies and partners, it achieves absolute control and strategic guidance over the entire ecosystem. This is a sophisticated legal and business architecture designed to cope with the complex global regulatory environment.

Deconstructing the Engine Room: Tether's New Financial Technology Stack

Tether's ambition is not only reflected in its strategic layout but also in its meticulous selection of underlying technologies. It does not blindly chase technological trends but acts like an experienced chief engineer, selecting the most mature and reliable components from the entire industry to build a "super engine" specifically optimized for institutional-level finance.

In terms of interoperability, Tether chose LayerZero's OFT standard to build its cross-chain USDT (i.e., USDT0). Unlike traditional "wrapped" assets, OFT adopts a "burn-mint" model, ensuring that USDT0 circulating on any chain is a standardized asset controlled by the issuer, fundamentally addressing liquidity fragmentation and the security risks of third-party bridges. This stands in stark contrast to its competitor Circle's private protocol CCTP, as Tether aims to create a more open and composable financial ecosystem, while Circle resembles a closed "walled garden."

In terms of performance, Tether also demonstrates its concept of "integrated innovation." The "optimistic parallel execution" equipped for "Stable" is an effective path validated by new-generation high-performance public chains like Monad and Sei, capable of achieving exponential growth in throughput. The PlasmaBFT consensus protocol equipped for "Plasma" is a customized implementation based on the mature "Fast HotStuff" protocol, providing lower latency and faster finality for payment settlement scenarios. This pragmatic and efficient technology selection strategy has significantly shortened the time to market for building reliable infrastructure for institutional clients.

The Geopolitical Endgame: Dancing in a Regulated World

Just as Tether is intensively laying out its infrastructure, the global regulatory landscape is also undergoing dramatic changes. Among them, the "GENIUS Act" being advanced by the U.S. Congress will have a profound impact on the entire stablecoin industry. The core of the bill is to establish a strict regulatory framework for stablecoins within the United States, requiring issuers to hold 1:1 high-quality liquid assets as reserves and to undergo rigorous audits and supervision.

In the face of a regulatory storm that could reshape the industry, Paolo Ardoino and Tether have demonstrated remarkable strategic resilience, deploying a set of moves that can be considered textbook-level "combination punches":

1. Consolidate offshore hegemony: Continue to position the existing USDT as a core product serving emerging markets and unbanked populations. The newly established Plasma and Stable networks are precisely designed to provide an unprecedentedly efficient and low-cost settlement channel for this vast offshore dollar market.
2. Expanding the onshore market: Ardoino has made it clear that Tether plans to launch a brand new, fully compliant stablecoin that meets all the requirements of the GENIUS Act in the United States. This new "U.S. version of Tether" will compete directly with Circle's USDC in the compliance arena in the U.S.

This "dual-line operation" strategy allows Tether to simultaneously meet the needs of different types of institutions. International traders who require globalization and high-efficiency settlement can use its offshore USDT and exclusive public chain. On the other hand, Wall Street asset management firms that need to be fully compliant and protected by U.S. law can use its future onshore stablecoin. It is evident that Tether is not passively responding to regulations but actively leveraging them. A regulatory bill that could have posed a survival threat to it has instead become a strategic catalyst for launching its "pincer attack" on the global market.

Conclusion: The New Foundation of the Empire

Looking back at the initial roadmap for the "Stable" network, we can now clearly see that it is not an isolated blueprint, but a foundational declaration for the new base of a vast empire. Tether is undergoing a profound transformation, evolving from an "application" dependent on others into a vertically integrated financial infrastructure platform with its own sovereign territory.

By building the Plasma and Stable public chains, Tether has solved its long-standing issues of value overflow and platform risk in one fell swoop. It is re-internalizing the implicit "platform tax" of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars that flow annually to networks such as Ethereum and TRON into the value of its own ecosystem. More importantly, it has established a strong technological and business moat, which is composed of its hundreds of billions in liquidity, two proprietary public chains, and a sophisticated strategy that dances with global regulations, making it difficult for any competitor to surpass.

The far-reaching impact of this transformation is just beginning to manifest. For Ethereum and TRON, they are about to face the risk of losing the most important "tenants" in their ecosystems. For Circle, the opponent it faces is no longer just a rival dominating the offshore market, but a powerful enemy capable of launching attacks on both global compliant and non-compliant battlefields simultaneously. A private entity is building a system independent of the traditional banking system, potentially carrying most of the future global value transfers on an underlying track. Tether's hidden agenda has become evident, and an economy centered around USDT is rising on the horizon.