1. Why Did Dollars Leave Bitcoin?
On October 6, 2014, the first 100 USDT were issued on Omni Layer. Omni Layer is a protocol built on Bitcoin. Twelve years later, about $80 million worth of USDT remains on Omni, accounting for just 0.04% of the current total supply (DefiLlama data, October 2, 2026).
In my view, USDT was born on Bitcoin because Tether wanted to make full use of Bitcoin’s potential. But in 2014, Bitcoin wasn’t ready. The protocol needed more time to lay the groundwork to support stablecoins and other assets without taking up too much of the limited space in each block.
At the time, writing asset data to Bitcoin meant competing with ordinary transactions for the same block space, resulting in high fees and limited capacity. In addition, Bitcoin is an open-source, decentralized project, and protocol development moves relatively slowly.
For these reasons, Tether chose to issue USDT on Ethereum (September 11, 2017) and Tron (April 2019). Overall, these two chains are more centralized, as each has a leading organization providing funding. Management by a single organization makes it possible to set a fixed roadmap, so development moves faster than on Bitcoin.
As a result, on August 17, 2023, Tether stopped issuing USDT on Omni due to insufficient demand (redemptions remained available).
2. Where Are Digital Dollars Today?
Stablecoins currently in circulation total about $313 billion, with USDT alone accounting for about 59% of the market (DefiLlama data, October 2, 2026). USDT’s supply is distributed across the following networks:
Tron: 50.2%
Ethereum: 40.1%
BNB Smart Chain: 5%
Solana: 1.5%
Stablecoins have also become a means of payment. According to a report by Bessemer Venture Partners, real payments made using stablecoins reached $400 billion in 2025, twice the previous year’s total. About 60% took place between businesses, covering supplier payments, wages, and cross-border invoices. On Tron and Ethereum, all these payments and balances are public.
3. A Shift in Existing Technology
The change comes from technology. Client-side validation, the model used by RGB Protocol on Bitcoin, addresses three problems from the Omni era:
Block space: Asset data does not go into blocks. Bitcoin carries only a hash of a few dozen bytes in an ordinary transaction; using a Tapret commitment requires no additional bytes at all.
High fees: Asset data no longer competes with ordinary payments for block space, so a transfer costs about as much in fees as an ordinary Bitcoin transaction.
Limited capacity: A Bitcoin transaction can anchor many transfers, which can even belong to different contracts; the same assets can also circulate in Lightning Network channels.
This approach also adds a layer of privacy. With client-side validation, only users participating in an asset transfer can see information such as the amount and transfer history, because the plaintext data is stored only on the users’ own devices. This is a major advantage over storing data publicly on a public ledger, since users do not have to reveal what they are transferring. If regulators need certain data for internal processes, RGB allows holders to disclose only part of the information, which is highly beneficial for privacy.
Even so, the protocol remains anchored to Bitcoin. The “digital fingerprint” of the asset data—that is, its hash—is written into a Bitcoin transaction, either in an OP_RETURN output or a Tapret commitment. The recipient then compares the off-chain data with the on-chain hash to verify that the token received is valid.
The design lets people use the Bitcoin blockchain without requiring any changes to Bitcoin’s core code.
4. Concrete Signs
Thanks to RGB’s new approach, Tether has decided to return to Bitcoin (its first proposal, announced in January 2025, used Taproot Assets). As Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino put it: “Bitcoin deserves a truly native, lightweight, private, and scalable stablecoin.”
This announcement opened a new chapter in the history of USDT on Bitcoin, followed by a series of developments:
August 2025: Tether announced plans to issue USDT on RGB.
February 2026: Utexo added on-chain RGB support to Tether’s Wallet Development Kit (WDK), launching the first module for issuing RGB assets.
August 2026: Utexo’s second module went live in WDK, bringing RGB assets into Lightning Network channels.
September 2026: UniSat was announced as the next launch partner; the “release candidate” label was removed from the core library for RGB v0.11.1.
October 2026: Utexo received a commercial license from Tether to issue USDT through exchanges, wallets, and payment service providers.
5. Good News for Bitcoin—But Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Bridge
I believe the return of the dollar is good news for every Bitcoin user, not just Tether or the companies building the underlying infrastructure. More activity on Bitcoin means more transactions and more fees; miners earn more for securing Bitcoin, making the network as a whole more secure.
The same applies to the Lightning Network. Today, many Lightning channels hold funds but route very few payments. If dollars flow through these channels, node operators can earn routing fees from funds that are currently idle. The more users there are on the most reliable blockchain, the more services everyone can access.
One step in this journey deserves a closer look: the cross-chain bridge.
USDT is issued by Tether, a company that cannot create dollars at will: under its own rules, every token is backed by reserves. So the dollars arriving on Bitcoin are not newly issued, at least for now. For this reason, Utexo’s bridge lets users lock existing USDT on another network (such as Ethereum or Tron), then mint the same amount of USDT on RGB. The process relies on signers running in secure hardware enclaves: one signer handles minting on Bitcoin, while returning requires multiple independent signers to meet the signature threshold.
However, once USDT is on Bitcoin, it works just like any other RGB asset. Recipients use client-side validation to check each transfer, Bitcoin’s own UTXOs prevent double-spending, and only the two parties to a transaction know the amounts and balances. These dollars can also circulate in Lightning Network channels.
Twelve years after the first 100 USDT were issued on Omni, the dollar has begun its journey back to Bitcoin. Stablecoins landing on RGB will be a milestone, not only for the companies involved but also for every Bitcoin user.
As of this writing, no deployment date has been announced. But five steps in fourteen months tell me one thing: digital dollars are nearly home.$BTC $ETH $SOL