What is Tether?

Crypto is trending in the world like no-other-thing. Crypto-currencies and its trading is the burning topic and everyone wants their piece of the cake.

Those shiny coins look so good when they rise up and up and sometimes when we commit money to them prior to such a trend, we have such a good day which is similar to when it drops and makes us panic.

The volatility of crypto coins is what seeks all of the attention and many of us would love to just put our earned money into crypto and hold them for good instead of just having it in our wallet. But the volatility also always keeps us in checking our portfolios all the time.

So, to our rescue, comes the fancy named token, called Tether! Probably you, the reader, have already heard about it since it’s such a famous token. But you want to know what exactly it is. Well, tether is a “stable-coin”! Yes, a stable coin in the crowd of high-volatile hoppers!

It is a coin which is pegged to the value of the established fiat currencies of the world. Most popularly and mostly with USD. Hence the token symbol being USDT.

How It Actually Works?

Tether is issued by Tether Limited, which keeps fiat USD in its reserves and issues tokens and promises that any token holder can exchange their token for fiat USD anytime they want from them.

How did it originate?

It started in 2014, when the stable-coin was created under the name of “Realcoin”on top of bitcoin protocol in which new tokens could be created. It was called “Omni Tether”. But with time, it evolved, and later Tether was shifted to other blockchain.

What Did It Evolve Into?

Tether gradually was shifted into more sophisticated and simpler blockchains, most popularly, Ethereum blockchain because of smart contracts and cheaper and faster transaction speeds.

Apart from Ethereum blockchain, it also got shifted to the Tron chain, known as TRC20 tokens (ERC20 tokens for Ethereum chain tokens) and EOS chain.

Mostly it is the ERC20 tether which is used in most exchanges and by holders.

How To Know Which Blockchain You Are Using?

Now, a curious question automatically arises: if you have USDT, which blockchain you are using?

Technically the tether token is nothing but packaged crypto of the underlying asset, which means Omni Tether is nothing but Bitcoins and ERC20 USDT is nothing but Ethereum, using a fancy name. Hence, a quick way to check the chain you are using is to check the wallet address of your token, generally for Bitcoin blockchain tokens, the address would be a Bitcoin address which starts with 1 or 3 or bc etc, while a ERC20 token would start with 0x and for Tron ones, it would start with T.

Another way is to just check it on the exchange or wallet you are using, since they specifically mention this for your reference or if they don’t, just contact their support. Generally, if it is not mentioned, then it is probably using ERC20 tokens.

Why Check Which Blockchain You Are Using?

Technically, irrespective of the blockchain, the value of the tokens remain fixed but it is of utmost importance to know which chain you are using if you want to transfer your tokens across wallets and sending it to the different blockchain will result in loss of tokens. Which is simply just similar to self-burning your own cash 😉 Another important reason is for your future use of the coins, since if you want a faster and cheaper transaction, you might want Tether on Tron blockchain or Ethereum one instead of Bitcoin blockchain since fees and transaction speeds are higher and slower respectively in the latter.

How to buy different types of Tether and store them?

You can always store your Tether tokens in the compatible wallets that support the token chains. For ERC20, you can store them in wallets that accept ERC20, like, Trust Wallet for example.

To buy Tether under your desired blockchain, you can use Google to just search for Exchanges that are offering the tokens.

As a reference, you can use StormGain Exchange for buying Omni Tether and to store in a wallet, you can get an Omni Wallet that is compatible and you can own the keys!

For buying ERC20 USDT tokens, you can use Binance, Bittrex etc. Since it is the default and most popularly used blockchain for USDT, you can probably find it in most crypto exchanges.

For TRC20 tokens, you can use Binance, BitFinex, KuCoin exchanges. For wallets, you can use Trust wallet for phones or TronLink and TronWallet.

Conclusion

Now that you know a bit about Tether, you might want to buy some Tether 😉 . Tether offers us stability and a reference coin for us to trade against and also a way to hold funds which we don’t want to put in trade or any investments at the moment but would love to use whenever we like. But, there are many rules and cautions to be followed, for say, the importance of knowing the blockchain of your tether tokens as mentioned earlier. Tether in my opinion, is not an investment asset itself since it is nothing but a kind of digital fiat currency, whose value can rise when the value of the fiat itself rises, but it does provide us with features of the crypto world which is a bit of anonymity, an ease of transaction with fast speeds and a way to hold and use our funds for trading with ease in the respective blockchain and across it!