In brief
- Only verified Tether customers can mint or redeem USDT directly, with a US$100,000 minimum, a redemption fee of the greater of US$1,000 or 0.1%, and a non-refundable 150 USDT verification fee. The terms bar US persons from even holding USDT, unless Tether agrees to treat them as Eligible Contract Participants, and also exclude Canadian and Singaporean persons (terms, updated 26 February 2026; fees page).
- Our count of the USDT contracts on Ethereum and Tron from 30 June to 29 September 2026 found 1,304 blacklist-addition events and 156 destroyed-funds events that burned about 75.7 million USDT.
- BDO’s Q2 2026 reasonable-assurance report puts reserves US$4.11 billion above liabilities at 30 June 2026, but it names no bank or custodian, and Tether’s terms let it suspend redemptions at its discretion.
Reader question: who can mint and redeem USDT directly with Tether, on what terms, and how often does Tether freeze tokens on-chain?
Tether issues USDT, the largest dollar stablecoin by circulating supply. At 30 June 2026 Tether reported US$183.62 billion of liabilities for all its issued digital tokens, not USDT alone (Q2 2026 release). Most holders never deal with Tether: they buy USDT on exchanges or receive it as payment. This profile sets out what the contracting entity, its terms and its latest assurance report say about direct access, and adds our own count of the freeze and burn events Tether runs on its two largest chains.
What is verified today
- Issuance and redemption: live (company-reported) for verified customers under the terms updated 26 February 2026. The Q2 2026 reserves report says “Tether tokens” (not USDT specifically) are issued on 13 chains; whether direct minting and redemption are offered on each of them today is not yet verified. Our on-chain count shows the contracts on Ethereum and Tron are active, which is not evidence of any particular customer’s fiat redemption.
- Legacy chains: redemption ended. Tether stopped redeeming USDT on Omni, Bitcoin Cash SLP, Kusama, EOS and Algorand from 1 September 2025 and EURT from 27 November 2025; CNHT redemptions end on 20 February 2027 (company-reported).
- Supply on Ethereum: observed. totalSupply at block 26,080,000 (29 September 2026) was 88,304,299,381.63 USDT, the same figure Tether’s transparency API reports. The API says 1.72 billion of that sits in Tether’s own reserve wallet as authorised but not issued, leaving about 86.58 billion in circulation on Ethereum.
- Bridged versions: not Tether tokens. The terms say wrapped or bridged USDT cannot be redeemed with Tether.
Entity and authority
| Entity | Jurisdiction | Status | What it permits | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tether International, S.A. de C.V. | El Salvador (redomiciled from the BVI; contracts of Tether Limited novated to it from 27 January 2025) | Verified on register: digital asset service provider PSAD-0028, registered 16 August 2024 | Digital asset services in El Salvador | CNAD register, read 29 September 2026 |
| USDT (Tether) | El Salvador | Verified: on CNAD’s list of stablecoins authorised through its public-offering process, registered 19 May 2025 | Trading of USDT in El Salvador | CNAD stablecoin list |
| Tether International, S.A. de C.V. | El Salvador | Company-reported: authorised stablecoin issuer supervised by CNAD; issuer register number not found on a CNAD page | Stablecoin issuance under the Digital Asset Issuance Law | Tether terms; BDO Q2 report |
| Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. | United States | Company-reported: issuer of USAT, launched 27 January 2026 | USAT only, not USDT | USAT release |
The terms are governed by British Virgin Islands law, with arbitration seated in London when the parties do not agree otherwise, even though the issuer now sits in El Salvador. Tether’s US-market token is USAT, which Anchorage Digital Bank issues, not Tether International.
Product scope, availability and eligibility
| Question | What Tether’s documents say |
|---|---|
| Who can mint and redeem directly | Verified customers only; the right to issue or redeem is personal to the customer |
| Who is excluded | “Prohibited Persons”: US persons (except Eligible Contract Participants “agreed by Tether, in its sole discretion”), Canadian and Singaporean persons, the Government of Venezuela, anyone in a Prohibited Jurisdiction (defined as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine), and sanctioned persons. The terms add that US persons may not hold or operate Tether tokens “in any way”, with the same ECP exception. Tether publishes no criteria for that exception. Beyond these lists, the terms let Tether refuse anyone from a FATF high-risk or increased-monitoring jurisdiction, politically exposed persons, and anyone who does not meet its due diligence, so falling outside the exclusions does not mean an application will be accepted. |
| Verification | Business verification with documents on request, including beneficial-ownership and tax self-certifications; Tether may apply enhanced due diligence at any time. The full document list is not published: not yet verified. |
| Minimum | US$100,000 per direct purchase or redemption |
| Fees | Redemption: greater of US$1,000 or 0.1%. Purchase: 0.1%. Verification: 150 USDT, non-refundable |
| Can Tether refuse or pause | Yes: it may delay or suspend purchases and redemptions at its sole discretion, including when a government directs it to |
| Everyone else | Holders without a verified account have no direct redemption route with Tether (our reading of the terms); selling on a trading venue is the practical exit |
Freezes and burns on Ethereum and Tron, 30 June to 29 September 2026
| Event (contract function) | Ethereum | Tron | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Address added to blacklist (AddedBlackList) | 132 | 1,172 (1,167 unique addresses) | 1,304 |
| Address removed from blacklist (RemovedBlackList) | 5 | 45 | 50 |
| Frozen balance destroyed (DestroyedBlackFunds) | 38 | 118 | 156 |
| USDT destroyed (token units) | 9,051,261.49 | 66,680,626.02 | about 75.7 million |
Method: Ethereum events for contract 0xdAC1…1ec7 between blocks 25,432,000 and 26,080,000, pulled from the Blockscout logs API and decoded with our own scripts; Tron events from TronGrid for the same measurement window (query boundaries 30 June 2026 17:31:35 UTC to 29 September 2026 02:01:23 UTC, about 90.4 days; not a full calendar quarter). Counts are events, not unique addresses. Largest single burn: about 3.95 million USDT on Tron. Only these two chains are counted. The contracts record what happened, not why. We did not establish the reason for individual actions in this dataset, so we cannot say how many followed a court or law-enforcement request. For one group of cases Tether has explained itself, see our report on Tether’s account of about US$550 million in Iran-linked USDT freezes.
What this means for a holder: a blacklisted address cannot move USDT, and Tether can later destroy that balance (the DestroyedBlackFunds event). Over the 90-day window, there were about 14 blacklist-addition events a day. The 75.7 million USDT destroyed is about 0.04% of the US$183.62 billion token liabilities at 30 June; it is a gross figure, and we have not analysed reissuance or case outcomes, so it is not a measure of holder losses.
Dependencies
- Reserves: at 30 June 2026 total assets were US$187.75 billion against US$183.64 billion of liabilities. The largest items were US Treasury bills (US$114.96 billion), reverse repo (US$25.62 billion), gold (US$18.84 billion), secured loans (US$13.45 billion), bitcoin (US$5.80 billion) and other investments (US$5.24 billion). Cash and bank deposits were US$40.3 million (BDO Q2 2026 report).
- Assurance: BDO Advisory Services S.r.l., Milan, gave a reasonable-assurance opinion under ISAE 3000 (Revised), signed 31 July 2026. Tether says KPMG gave an unqualified audit opinion on the FY2025 statements (company release); we have not read the audit report itself.
- Banks and custodians: not publicly disclosed in the terms, the Q2 release or the BDO report.
- Deposit insurance or redemption protection: not publicly disclosed; none is described in the terms or the BDO report.
- Affiliates: the terms allow reserves to include loans and other assets from affiliates.
Alternatives
| Tether (USDT) | Circle (USDC) | Paxos Trust Company, N.A. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who may redeem with the issuer | Verified customers; US persons excluded except Tether-approved ECPs; Canadian and Singaporean persons excluded | Circle Mint account holders only; EEA retail holders have a form-based route with Circle France (MiCA policy) | Registered Customers only (stablecoin terms) |
| Regulated where | El Salvador (CNAD) | EU (Circle France, ACPR EMI); Circle’s New York trust charter scope not established | OCC national trust charter 25379 for this entity, which manages USDP and PYUSD under Paxos’s stablecoin terms (30 June 2026); USDG is managed by Paxos’s Singapore and Finnish entities, not this bank |
| Freeze power in terms | Yes, incl. on government direction | Yes, on a legal order from a valid government authority (USDC terms) | Not checked for this profile |
A US business is barred from USDT under Tether’s terms unless Tether accepts it as an Eligible Contract Participant, so it would look at a US-issued token such as USAT, USDC, or Paxos’s USDP or PYUSD, which the chartered Paxos bank manages. Paxos says services can depend on where a customer lives and which Paxos entity it registered with. For EU retail holders, Circle France publishes a form-based redemption process; Tether publishes none for them. We have not compared minimums and fees, because we have not verified Circle’s or Paxos’s published schedules.
Limitations and unknowns
- Banks and custodians holding reserves: not publicly disclosed (checked terms, Q2 release, BDO report).
- Stablecoin-issuer register number at CNAD: not yet verified; only the service-provider entry (PSAD-0028) was found.
- Parent or holding company of Tether International: not yet verified (checked the terms, the BDO report, which names Tether Global Investments Fund SICAF SA as the engaging party without stating its relationship to the issuer, and the KPMG and Q2 releases).
- Freeze counts on Solana, Ton and the other 9 chains: not yet verified.
- Reason for individual freezes: not yet verified (checked terms and on-chain data; Tether’s news and law-enforcement pages not yet parsed).
- Gap between US$184.59 billion gross redemption value of all tokens and US$183.62 billion token liabilities: the BDO report excludes US$808 million of tokens Tether holds outside its treasury wallet; the remaining US$158 million is not yet verified: we could not match it to a line in the report.
- Which Tether chains still offer direct minting and redemption today: not yet verified.
- Legal arrangement under which reserves are held (segregation, trust or other): not publicly disclosed in the documents checked.
- Whether and when USDT will meet the US GENIUS Act: not yet verified; Tether says it is progressing towards it. US regulators are still writing the implementing rules (see the Federal Reserve’s proposed GENIUS Act capital rules for stablecoin issuers).
- KPMG FY2025 audit: not yet verified beyond Tether’s own release.
Key facts (as of 29 September 2026)
- Issuer: Tether International, S.A. de C.V., per Tether’s terms (El Salvador). Register-confirmed: CNAD digital asset service provider entry PSAD-0028. Stablecoin-issuer authority: company-reported. Parent and group structure: not yet verified.
- Token liabilities, all Tether digital tokens: US$183.62 billion at 30 June 2026 (BDO)
- Reserve excess: US$4.11 billion at 30 June 2026, down from US$6.34 billion at 31 December 2025
- Direct access: US$100,000 minimum; redemption fee greater of US$1,000 or 0.1%
- Chains with Tether tokens issued: 13 (BDO report footnote, 30 June 2026; the footnote says “Tether tokens”, not USDT specifically)
- Ethereum and Tron, 30 June to 29 September 2026: 1,304 blacklist-addition events, about 75.7 million USDT destroyed
Sources
- CNAD, digital asset service provider register and admissible stablecoins list
- BDO, Independent assurance report, 30 June 2026
- Tether documentation: terms, fees, transparency data, Q2 2026 release, USAT release
- Ethereum USDT contract events via Blockscout; Tron USDT events via TronGrid (Cryptured count, 29 September 2026)
- Circle USDC terms; Paxos stablecoin terms
Last updated: 29 September 2026. Next recheck triggered by: Tether’s Q3 2026 BDO report, a change to its terms or fees, a CNAD register change, or a change in USDT’s status under the US GENIUS Act.
