Tether grants Utexo a license to issue USDT on Bitcoin, expected this month

USDT is set to return to Bitcoin this month, more than a decade after the stablecoin debuted there in 2014 on the Omi protocol, arriving through Utexo, a Tether-backed infrastructure project founded in 2025 that has been granted a commercial license to issue the token on the network using its trademark, CoinDesk reported.

Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino welcomed the move on X last week with "It's coming home," a line about a stablecoin with a market capitalization of nearly $190 billion, the largest of its kind, which spent the years since 2014 mostly on Ethereum and later Tron. The Utexo end of it is concrete: co-founder Viktor Ihnatiuk told CoinDesk in a Telegram message that the license covers issuing USDT on Bitcoin using the stablecoin's trademark and bringing it to exchanges, wallets and payment providers, with the project supplying the infrastructure through APIs, SDKs and cloud services. Utexo raised $7.5 million earlier this year.

Utexo's architecture leans on the RGB protocol and client-side validation to keep transaction data largely off Bitcoin's public ledger, with ownership anchored in unspent transaction outputs, the chunks of bitcoin left over from a transfer, similar to change from a cash purchase. Ethereum and Tron run account-based models that share balance updates and transactions on public ledgers; under Utexo's design the details stay entirely off-chain between the counterparties, and Bitcoin's ledger is used solely to demonstrate proof of ownership cryptographically. The aim, per the report, is an architecture for USDT more confidential than its equivalent on Ethereum or Tron, with three primary use cases listed, among them private USDT transfers and direct swaps.

Tether's own balance sheet is the logic Ihnatiuk invokes. The company holds around 100,000 BTC worth $8.4 billion as of mid-August, according to Bitcoin Treasuries, and he told CoinDesk that "Tether has always been a Bitcoin company," describing bitcoin for the issuer as a stability haven alongside gold, which is why in his telling Tether kept buying BTC and supporting the Bitcoin community. He also said he cannot speak for Tether directly, and offered that his personal observation is that Bitcoin is a big priority for the firm. "It's our job to make USDT as accessible on Bitcoin as it is everywhere else," he said.

Routing the return through a licensed project rather than the issuer's own engineering puts a separate entity between Tether and Bitcoin's base layer. Whether balances actually settle on the chain is a question the license does not answer, and the coverage does not say what volume either side expects; Utexo's first issuance, anticipated this month, is the nearest date on which that becomes observable.