Tether’s Last-Minute Twist: Old-Chain USDT Lives On

Just two days before officially ending support for Omni, Bitcoin Cash SLP, Kusama, Vaulta, and Algorand, Tether made a surprising announcement.

It confirmed that existing USDT on these networks will not be frozen.

• You’ll still be able to hold them.
• You’ll still be able to transfer them between addresses.
• You’ll still be able to exchange them with others (if someone wants to trade).
• You’ll even be able to sell them — if you manage to find a buyer.

The only change from September 1: Tether will no longer redeem them for dollars.

In fact, this takes USDT on Omni back to the same status it had before 2018. Back then, Tether’s Terms of Service also stated that it had no obligation to redeem USDT for fiat (see archived version, section 3).

At the time, nobody seemed to care, and everyone still treated 1 USDT as worth $1.
But what happens now? Will people still value these tokens at parity with the dollar?

I’ll be watching this closely. On Rabbit Swap, it’s still technically possible to exchange USDT on Omni, Kusama, Vaulta, and Algorand. If there’s market demand, you’ll find the best available rates on rabbit.io. But right now, it’s anyone’s guess what those rates will look like — or whether there will be demand at all.

And who knows — maybe USDT on these chains will end up as a rare collectible, with a price much higher than $1. Why not? The only catch is that, according to Tether, there are still plenty of tokens out there: more than 82 million USDT remain on Omni alone. The real question is — will there be enough collectors for all of them?