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USDT0’s road to $90B in volume
Depending on who you ask, stablecoins are best suited for one of many different purposes.
To some, they’re a great hedge against foreign exchange volatility. To others, it’s about getting yield onchain. And for those in countries with skyrocketing inflation and currency devaluation, it’s about having access to the relative stability of the US dollar.
For Lorenzo Romagnoli, the co-founder of USDT0, the focus is on the latter. Since launching in January 2025, the protocol has processed around $90 billion in volume. But for the first four months, USDT0’s 20-person team didn't fully understand who was using it.
Romagnoli explained that he and his co-founder “Kevin M” kept running into money movement issues while they were working in the Tether ecosystem, on native deployments to chains like Celo and TON.
"Before the existence of USDT0, the only way you had as an ecosystem to attract USDT onto your chain was to have people minting directly from Tether, but that's a pretty cumbersome process,” Romagnoli said. “Very few entities can actually mint USDT directly from Tether itself […] The other solution was basically trusting third-party bridges.”
So when Romagnolli and his co-founders thought of building USDT0, the pitch to Tether's leadership was straightforward: Let users move the USDT they already have across chains for free, without friction or size limits.
"It's the USDT that you're always used to, but it just happens to be issued via a series of smart contracts that operate between blockchains,” he explained.
When USDT0 first launched, the protocol moved between $500,000 and a million dollars every 24 hours on a “good day.” Then, in February 2025, it started seeing transfers worth $50 million as more people started using it crosschain.
A lot of this, he credits to Tether and USDT0 focusing on people in emerging economies who needed a stable currency, whereas a lot of other stablecoins focus on Americans or European countries for adoption.
Today, Romagnolli said, the protocol moves between $100 million and $300 million per day, though at the time of publication, USDT0 showed 24-hour volumes of about $25 million. Still its market cap sits at about $4 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Meanwhile, Tether’s UST has a market cap of about $189 billion, with 24-hour volumes of about $72.6 billion in 24-hour volume.
Going forward, Romagnoli is not so concerned about competition, expecting a vast majority of the market to be “dominated by one [or] two players only.”
This contrasts other stablecoin issuers’ strategy of working with enterprises and fintechs to whip up their own stablecoins. But Romagnoli believes that will prove less successful on the global stage as adoption for USDT continues to grow.
“Everything else will just be long-tail.”
Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.
The latest Talking Tokens podcast 🎙️
For today’s episode, I interviewed Lorenzo Romagnoli, co-founder of USDT0, a stablecoin protocol that has moved over $90 billion in USDT across 25+ blockchains since launching in January 2025. Lorenzo makes the case that stablecoins were not just built for Americans or Europeans but for people in emerging markets across Africa, Latin America, and Asia who needed a way out of crushing inflation, and explains why that's the core reason Tether's dominance is so hard to compete with. They also get into what it will actually take for AI agents to transact onchain at scale, and why Lorenzo believes the teams still building with true decentralization in mind are the ones worth watching.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction to USDT Zero and Its Founders
02:31 The Evolution of USDT and Decentralized Finance
05:36 Understanding the Mechanics of USDT Zero
08:33 User Behavior and Volume Trends
11:34 Tether's Role in the Global Financial Ecosystem
15:38 Targeting Emerging Markets with Stablecoins
18:45 The Competitive Landscape of Stablecoins
21:12 The Future of Stablecoins
24:05 Global Adoption and Use Cases
27:32 The Rise of USDT and Market Dynamics
30:11 Innovation and Staying Ahead
34:23 The Role of Decentralization in Finance
39:45 Advice for Future Innovators
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