The cryptocurrency industry’s predominant stablecoin, tether, now has a new home on Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain.
As of today, July 29, 2019, the Bitcoin secondary network now supports USDT as one of its Liquid assets. These assets, the tokens that power the Liquid network, hold a one-to-one parity with on-chain assets like BTC. Liquid USDT will now join L-BTC as the second asset to be available on the network.
Launched in 2018, Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain has been billed as a federated secondary network for quick and cheap high-value transfers of bitcoin, especially from exchange to exchange. To peg their on-chain BTC to L-BTC, users can facilitate a swap through one of the network’s Liquid members, who host the nodes that keep the network alive and mint new Liquid assets.
2019 has been a year of growth for Blockstream’s project. Back in May, it unveiled its Liquid Securities platform, which paved the way for launching security tokens on the network. Not too long after, the team integrated support for atomic swaps as well as the Lightning Network.
Deposits and trading for Liquid USDT will be available on Bitfinex beginning today, and “a number of other Liquid members are working on enabling Liquid USDt, including BTSE, BTCTrader/BtcTurk, OKEx, OKCoin, RenrenBit, and Sideshift AI,” according to a press release.
“The addition of Tether is a major milestone in increasing the utility of the Liquid Network,” said Samson Mow, CSO at Blockstream, per the release. “In combination with the latest developments in the Liquid ecosystem, traders can now achieve some really cool things, such as OTC atomic swaps, super-fast arbitrage between exchanges, and easy Tether custody with Blockstream Green.”
The Liquid team anticipates that Lightning Network support for Liquid USDT isn’t too far off, something it believes will only improve low-latency liquidity for the community’s traders. Liquid USDT will also be available for self-custody in Blockstream’s multi-signature Green Wallet.
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