USDT Arrives on RGB – But Only Halfway

Tether has announced the launch of USDT on Bitcoin using RGB technology. The very first tokens have already been bridged over from Ethereum.

I’ve written about RGB before: it’s one of the approaches that bring advanced smart contract functionality to Bitcoin. Its closest rival is Taproot Assets by Lightning Labs. For a long time, many observers said that whichever ecosystem would get USDT first was expected to win — because users would inevitably follow.

But now that USDT has arrived on RGB, I’d say the biggest threat to RGB isn’t Taproot Assets — it’s RGB’s own investors.

Here’s why: in the latest Testnet-only release (v0.11), critical vulnerabilities were found. Developers essentially had to rebuild major parts of the system from scratch. Impatient investors, however, pushed forward an alternative fork that preserved compatibility with earlier work. As a result, there are now two competing mainnet versions: RGB 0.12 (from the core developers) and RGB 0.11.1 (backed by investors). These versions are not compatible with each other.

USDT has been issued on the investor-backed version (0.11.1). Which means anyone building apps for RGB 0.12 won’t have USDT support.

Given this fragmentation, I don’t see much of a future for USDT on RGB. At the very least, RGB won’t be able to pull users away from Tron, Ethereum, Aptos, TON, and the other chains where USDT is already thriving.

And as always, on rabbit.io, you can swap USDT across all of these blockchains at the best rates — with no limits and no registration required.