Stablecoins are the bedrock of the new digital economy, powering lending markets, facilitating cross-border payments, and serving as the primary medium of exchange for millions of users worldwide. Among them, one stablecoin dominates in both scale and adoption, with $145B in circulation across a dozen-plus chains: USDT.

But as blockchain ecosystems multiply and specialize, legacy stablecoin infrastructure has struggled to keep up. Liquidity is increasingly fragmented and users move across ecosystems, from rollups to appchains to alternative L1s, only to discover that “USDT” means something slightly different on each network. It might be bridged from Ethereum. It might be native. It might be locked in a liquidity pool somewhere. Or it might not be there at all.

USDT0 is the solution to this problem. Built on LayerZero’s OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) standard, USDT0 unifies USDT liquidity across chains with a standardized, secure, and composable protocol.

The Challenge: Fragmented Liquidity in a Multichain World

As the number of blockchain networks grows, stablecoin infrastructure has become increasingly fragmented. Traditionally, USDT has been deployed separately on each chain via Tether or issued through third-party bridges. Each version exists in isolation, tied to its own contract, with no awareness of the others.

This approach has led to several inefficiencies:

• Liquidity Silos: Each chain’s version of USDT operates in relative isolation, creating shallow, siloed liquidity that leads to higher slippage and reduced capital efficiency. This results in fragmented ecosystems that don’t scale with demand.

• Bridging Complexity: Stablecoin users often rely on third-party bridge solutions that introduce both technical risk and user friction. These bridges are single points of failure in an otherwise decentralized stack, responsible for over ~$2 billion in historical losses to date.

• Operational Overhead: Until now, managing a stablecoin across dozens of chains required redundant infrastructure, monitoring, and liquidity provisioning. This creates an operational burden that increases as ecosystems grow.

In short, the current multichain reality has turned a simple, stable asset into a complex, fragmented system. USDT0 eliminates these inefficiencies.

The Solution: USDT0’s Native, Omnichain Liquidity Layer

USDT0 brings the largest stablecoin in the world to the most widely-adopted blockchains with an efficient, cross-liquidity standard. As a unified liquidity protocol for USDT, USDT0 brings the same trusted USDT to every major blockchain through a single, secure, omnichain system without the need for bridged or wrapped assets. In other words, it is the USDT contract you learned to love and use, deployed in a way that makes it universally interoperable, composable, and scalable.

Built on LayerZero’s OFT standard, USDT0 transforms USDT into a natively composable, cross-chain asset. Instead of deploying synthetic versions of USDT on each chain, USDT0 uses a single source of truth (the Ethereum mainnet) to anchor all minting and redemption activity to the widest, most battle-tested USDT deployment. From there, USDT0 is instantiated across supported networks via LayerZero’s omnichain messaging protocol. This allows the same token to flow natively between chains, always fully backed and without fragmenting liquidity. The result is one canonical supply of USDT, accessible wherever users and applications need it.

How USDT0 Works

At the core of USDT0 is a lock-and-mint mechanism underpinned by LayerZero’s OFT standard, which enables native cross-chain transfers of USDT without using wrapped tokens or third-party bridges. This architecture is both transparent and secure, and it's optimized for capital efficiency, low-latency movement, and ease of integration.

1. Ethereum-Centric Collateral USDT0 is backed 1:1 by USDT locked on Ethereum in a transparent, non-custodial smart contract. This contract holds all collateral and functions as the only reserve pool, eliminating the need for duplicative liquidity pools or synthetic mirrors on other chains.

2. Minting on Destination Chains When a user deposits USDT into the Ethereum contract, a LayerZero message is triggered that instructs a corresponding USDT0 token to be minted on the destination chain. This message is validated by Decentralized Verifier Networks, including LayerZero’s own verifier and a dedicated USDT0 DVN, ensuring integrity and liveness.

3. Burning and Redemption Conversely, when users want to exit a network, they initiate a burn of their USDT0 tokens on that chain. Once verified, the equivalent amount of USDT is released back to the user on Ethereum. This lock-and-mint model ensures that the circulating supply of USDT0 across all chains always matches the locked USDT on Ethereum, preserving trust and solvency.

4. Cross-Chain Transfers Transfers between chains follow the same pattern: USDT0 is burned on the source chain and minted on the destination, all through a single cross-chain message facilitated by Layer Zero’s OFT standard. The result is instant, gas-efficient, and slippage-free movement of stablecoin liquidity between any supported network.

Unified Liquidity, Universal Utility

USDT0 introduces a fundamentally better model for stablecoin liquidity that benefits all builders and users across the most active blockchain ecosystems.

For builders, USDT0 makes stablecoin integration more composable and scalable. Teams can plug into a unified USDT token across multiple chains, simplifying their integrations, reducing liquidity fragmentation, and ensuring that every user has access to the same core asset.

Similarly, USDT0 represents a major improvement in how stablecoin liquidity is provisioned and managed for exchanges and other institutional stablecoin users. By reducing the need for separate market infrastructure per chain, USDT0 simplifies backend operations and improves capital efficiency. Risk is reduced as well, with less reliance on third-party bridges and fewer liquidity sync issues.

And for everyday users, USDT0 offers faster and cheaper cross-chain transfers, eliminating the need for third-party bridges or complex wrapped token swaps. Because all USDT0 is fully backed by USDT on Ethereum, users retain the same trust and reliability that USDT has always provided, with an improved user experience.

Your USDT, Anywhere

USDT0 represents the next evolution in how stablecoins move, scale, and operate freely within a multichain world. By unifying liquidity, reducing complexity, and eliminating the fragmentation that has long plagued the industry, USDT0 is laying the groundwork for a new era of modern finance.

It retains everything that made USDT trusted and valuable in the first place—backing, security, simplicity—while unlocking the benefits of omnichain interoperability. For developers, it’s a composable standard. For users, it’s an invisible but seamless improvement. And for the industry at large, it’s the beginning of a new standard for capital movement across blockchains.

Welcome to the next evolution of USDT.

Interested in diving deeper into USDT0? Check out our developer documentation.