USD₮ is a digital dollar, powered by blockchain technology, a stablecoin that is pegged 1:1 to the USD. USD₮ provides individuals and organizations with a robust and decentralized method of exchanging value while using a familiar accounting unit.

Tether tokens exist as digital tokens built on several leading blockchains, including Algorand, Avalanche, Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni, Polygon, Tezos, Tron, Solana, Kava and Statemine. These transport protocols consist of open source software that interface with blockchains to allow for the issuance and redemption of Tether tokens. Every Tether token is 100% backed by Tether's reserves. As a fully transparent company, Tether publishes a record of the current reserve assets.

USDT — or as it was known at the time, Realcoin — was launched in 2014 by Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins and Craig Sellars. Brock Pierce is a well-known entrepreneur who has co-founded a number of high-profile projects in the crypto and entertainment industries. In 2013, he co-founded a venture capital firm Blockchain Capital, which by 2017 had raised over $80 million in funding. In 2014, Pierce became the director of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit established to help improve and promote Bitcoin. Pierce has also co-founded Block.one, the company behind EOS, one of the largest cryptocurrencies on the market. Reeve Collins was the CEO of Tether for the first two years of its existence. Prior to that, he had co-founded several successful companies, such as the online ad network Traffic Marketplace, entertainment studio RedLever and gambling website Pala Interactive. As of 2020, Collins is heading SmarMedia Technologies, a marketing and advertising tech company. Other than working on Tether, Craig Sellars has been a member of the Omni Foundation for over six years. Its Omni Protocol allows users to create and trade smart-contract based properties and currencies on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. Sellars has also worked in several other cryptocurrency companies and organizations, such as Bitfinex, Factom, Synereo and the MaidSafe Foundation.

USDT’s unique feature is the fact that its value is guaranteed by Tether to remain pegged to the U.S. dollar. According to Tether, whenever it issues new USDT tokens, it allocates the same amount of USD to its reserves, thus ensuring that USDT is fully backed by cash and cash equivalents. The famously high volatility of the crypto markets means that cryptocurrencies can rise or fall by 10-20% within a single day, making them unreliable as a store of value. USDT, on the other hand, is protected from these fluctuations. This property makes USDT a safe haven for crypto investors: during periods of high volatility, they can park their portfolios in Tether without having to completely cash out into USD. In addition, USDT provides a simple way to transact a U.S. dollar equivalent between regions, countries and even continents via blockchain — without having to rely on a slow and expensive intermediary, like a bank or a financial services provider. However, over the years, there have been a number of controversies regarding the validity of Tether’s claims about their USD reserves, at times disrupting USDT’s price, which went down as low as $0.88 at one point in its history. Many have raised concerns about the fact that Tether’s reserves have never been fully audited by an independent third party.

In July 2022, Tether, alongside peer-to-peer data network Hypercore and its sister company Bitfinex, collaborated on a social media app called Keet. The fully encrypted video chat application is currently a desktop-only app for now, but there are plans to extend the product to mobile devices soon. Keet app is the first app to be deployed on Holepunch, a platform that allows developers to build Web3 apps. And although Keet is still a closed-source project, the companies plan to make it open-source by the end of the year. Commenting on why Tether was launching a chat app, Ardoino, who doubles as the chief strategy officer at Holepunch, simply said “freedom of speech.”

There is no hard-coded limit on the total supply of USDT — given the fact that it belongs to a private company, theoretically, its issuance is limited only by Tether’s own policies. However, because Tether claims that every single USDT is supposed to be backed by one U.S. dollar, the amount of tokens is limited by the company’s actual cash reserves. Moreover, Tether does not disclose its issuance schedules ahead of time. Instead, they provide daily transparency reports, listing the total amount of their asset reserves and liabilities, the latter corresponding to the amount of USDT in circulation. As of September 2020, there are over 14.4 billion USDT tokens in circulation, which are backed by $14.6 billion in assets, according to Tether.

USDT does not have its own blockchain — instead, it operates as a second-layer token on top of other cryptocurrencies’ blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, Tron, Algorand, Bitcoin Cash and OMG, and is secured by their respective hashing algorithms.

It is possible to buy Tether / USDT on a large number of cryptocurrency exchanges. In fact, USDT’s average daily trading volume is often on par or even exceeds that of Bitcoin. It is especially prominent on those exchanges where fiat-to-crypto trading pairs are unavailable, as it provides a viable alternative to USD. Here are some of the most popular exchanges that support Tether trading: Binance OKEx HitBTC Huobi Global

In May 2022, Tether announced the launch of MXNT, a new stablecoin backed by the Mexican peso. The move marked its expansion into the Latin American market following earlier debuts of its USDT, EURT and CNHT stablecoins, pegged to the U.S. dollar, euro and Chinese yuan, respectively. Upon launch, MXNT will be available on three major blockchains: Ethereum, Polygon and Tron. According to the firm’s CTO, Paolo Ardoino, the decision to expand into Latin America was fueled by an increase in cryptocurrency usage in the region. Notably, a report from cryptocurrency payments company Triple A revealed that 40% of Mexican companies were interested in adopting cryptocurrencies in one form or the other, with 71% within the segment specifically focused on cryptocurrency usage. Tether named Mexico a “prime location” for the next Latin American crypto hub. The plan is to onboard as many new users within the Latin American market, and use the launch of MXNT as a testing ground for future fiat-pegged currencies in the region.

Founded in 2017, Chainlink is a blockchain abstraction layer that enables universally connected smart contracts. Through a decentralized oracle network, Chainlink allows blockchains to securely interact with external data feeds, events and payment methods, providing the critical off-chain information needed by complex smart contracts to become the dominant form of digital agreement. The Chainlink Network is driven by a large open-source community of data providers, node operators, smart contract developers, researchers, security auditors and more. The company focuses on ensuring that decentralized participation is guaranteed for all node operators and users looking to contribute to the network. To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Chainlink.

Sergey Nazarov is a co-founder and CEO at Chainlink Labs. He graduated with a degree in business administration from New York University, with a focus on philosophy and administration. His professional career began as a teaching fellow at NYU Stern School of Business. In 2009, Nazarov co-founded ExistLocal, a peer-to-peer marketplace for authentic local experiences. In 2014, he also co-founded CryptaMail, a completely decentralized, blockchain-based email service. In 2014, Nazarov teamed up with Steve Ellis and launched SmartContract, a platform that brings smart contracts to life by connecting them to external data and widely accepted bank payments. SmartContract was one of the entrepreneurial ventures that led Sergey Nazarov to the founding of Chainlink. Steve Ellis graduated with a degree in computer science from New York University in 2010. Right after graduating, he became a software engineer at Pivotal Labs. In 2014, he co-founded the Secure Asset Exchange, a company facilitating easy web access to a decentralized asset exchange.

Chainlink is one of the first networks to allow the integration of off-chain data into smart contracts. With many trusted partners, Chainlink is one of the major players in the data processing field. Due to the integration of off-chain data, Chainlink has attracted the attention of numerous trusted data providers, including Brave New Coin, Alpha Vantage and Huobi. Data providers can sell access to data directly to Chainlink, thus monetizing the information they have. As a decentralized network, Chainlink allows users to become node operators and earn revenue by running critical data infrastructure required for blockchains’ success. Chainlink uses a large collection of node operators to collectively power a wide range of decentralized Price Feed oracle networks live in-production, which currently secure billions in value for leading DeFi applications like Synthetix, Aave, Compound and more.

At present, Chainlink has been criticized for its dependence on a limited number of trusted nodes despite its efforts to be as decentralized as possible. However, LINK staking intends to remove this concern. LINK staking will introduce rewards and penalties to incentivize the proper operation of the Chainlink oracle network. It will also enhance the ability of node operators to receive tasks and earn fees within the Chainlink network. In this system, participants will lock up their LINK tokens as collateral. This collateral can be taxed or “slashed” if a node misreports data. The LINK tokens taxed from dishonest validators will be redistributed as earnings to honest validators. The developers of Chainlink hope that the introduction of this crypto-economic security should make the cost of attacking the network's price oracle greater than the potential profits an attack would generate. This is a similar gamification strategy that blockchain networks, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, depend on. Similarly, LINK holders that do not run their own node can participate in staking by delegating their tokens to a trusted node operator. Chainlink developers estimate that the staking program will offer a 5% return initially from a combination of emissions from the Treasury and fees paid by users of Chainlink's data feeds, and it will ultimately rely on only fees earned by the network. The participation of community members in staking will further incentivize node operators to remain honest. Participants will be able to choose where to delegate their stake through reputation scores given to node operators that consistently provide valid data feeds.

During the initial coin offering (ICO) for LINK in September 2017, Chainlink announced a total and maximum supply of 1,000,000,000 LINK tokens. The current supply is about 453,509,553 LINK tokens, or about 45% of the total supply, as of end-September 2021. The Chainlink price at ICO was $0.11 and a total of 350 million LINK tokens were sold. This represents an over 200X from the ICO price to Chainlink price today. Chainlink price experienced a massive bull run in the period around mid-2019 to mid-2020. Chainlink bulls were colloquially referred to as “LINK Marines,'' becoming a well-known meme in the crypto community. Chainlink price reached an all-time high of $52.88 on May 9, 2021, on the back of an overall crypto market rally, as well as ongoing developments in the Chainlink ecosystem. According to the ICO documentation, 35% of the total token supply will go towards node operators and the incentivization of the ecosystem. Another 35% of LINK tokens were distributed during public sale events. Lastly, the remaining 30% of the total token supply was directed towards the company for the continued development of the Chainlink ecosystem and network.

As an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, Chainlink is secured by the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Unlike the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus utilized by Bitocin, PoS relies on the amount of staked tokens for selecting node validators. PoS protocols were created with the idea to battle the vast power consumption required by PoW systems. PoS models are becoming increasingly popular as they need less electrical power and are easily scalable. While PoW has proven itself a reliable consensus mechanism, Ethereum and all other ERC-20 tokens have been growing rapidly and setting the trend in the space.

Chainlink and the LINK token are among the most popular cryptocurrencies on the market. Considering this, a lot of exchanges have pushed to start offering trades in LINK. One top exchange to buy Chainlink is Binance. Other exchanges offering trades in LINK include: Huobi Global Coinbase Pro Gate.io Kraken It is important to consider the fact that investing in cryptocurrency carries risk, just like any other investment. To check Chainlink price live in the fiat currency of your choice, you can use CoinMarketCap’s converter feature directly on the Chainlink currency page. Alternatively, use the dedicated exchange rate converter page. Popular Chainlink price pairs include: LINK/USD, LINK/GBP, LINK/AUD and LINK/EUR. You can read more about how to enter the market and how to buy BTC, LINK or any other token on CoinMarketCap’s education portal — Alexandria.

Chainlink has grown from aggregating and providing cryptocurrency price data to DeFi protocols like Aave, to a lot more. The ecosystem currently access over 1B data points, securing over $75B in value through 1,000 project integrations with 700 oracle networks. Mainstream organizations like AccuWeather, FedEx, FlightStats and the Associated Press have partnered with Chainlink for data verification. However, one of the biggest wins Chainlink have secured is onboarding Eric Schmidt, ex-Google chairman and CEO, as a technical advisor to the oracle network protocol. According to Schmidt, "Chainlink is a secret ingredient to unlocking the potential of smart contract platforms and revolutionizing business and society," and he is interested in helping Chainlink build a world powered by truth. Schmidt joins other notable Chainlink advisors including former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and DocuSign co-founder Tom Gonser. On the roadmap for 2022, Chainlink will finally rollout staking for LINK holders to secure the network and earn rewards. Chainlink has been working on a staking solution for years, however oracle networks are not a blockchain but a form of decentralized computing. Co-founder Nazarov explained that Chainlink does not produce blocks but “make consensus on hundreds of oracle networks about price data.” He says the team is finally satisfied with the security and scalability of the consensus mechanism and ready to launch staking this year.

In December 2021, the Chainlink oracle network introduced the staking of the LINK token to promote "sustainable growth and security." With LINK staking, Chainlink intends to bring a new layer of "crypto economic" security to the oracle network. It will do this by giving ecosystem participants, including node operators and community members, the ability to increase the security of Chainlink's oracle services by backing them with staked LINK tokens. This functions just like other crypto-staking platforms where participants in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network have to lock up a specific amount of tokens to contribute to the security of the network.

The first iteration of LINK staking, named version 0.1, is expected to be launched by the end of 2022. Its success will determine the launch time for version 1.0 and then a full version with all functionalities, named 2.0. The launch of LINK staking will officially kick off the Chainlink Economics 2.0 era. Chainlink's co-founder, Sergey Nazarov, believes that this era will usher in society's inevitable shift to cryptographically guaranteed systems. “A society powered by cryptographic guarantees needs a system of cryptographic truth to prove what happened, whether that’s about random numbers, market data, weather events, or even just computations that the trust-minimized application needs. This is the world that we’re moving towards," Nazarov said in an interview.

Launched in July 2017, Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange globally based on daily trading volume. Binance aims to bring cryptocurrency exchanges to the forefront of financial activity globally. The idea behind Binance’s name is to show this new paradigm in global finance — Binary Finance, or Binance. Aside from being the largest cryptocurrency exchange globally, Binance has launched a whole ecosystem of functionalities for its users. The Binance network includes the Binance Chain, Binance Smart Chain, Binance Academy, Trust Wallet and Research projects, which all employ the powers of blockchain technology to bring new-age finance to the world. BNB is an integral part of the successful functioning of many of the Binance sub-projects.

Changpeng Zhao is the founder and CEO of Binance. In 2001, Zhao joined Bloomberg as head of tradebook futures development. He spent four years with the company and later joined Fusion Systems as a partner. Since 2013, Changpeng Zhao has been actively involved with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. He became head of development at Blockchain, and in 2015 he founded BijieTech. In 2017, Zhao officially launched Binance, and he has been the CEO of the company ever since. He Yi is a co-founder and chief marketing officer at Binance. She started her career as a TV anchor and presenter on China Travel TV in 2012. Later, in 2014, Yi co-founded OKCoin, which was the largest fiat-to-crypto exchange in China at the time. In 2017, she joined forces with Changpeng Zhao, and together they created the largest crypto exchange globally — Binance.

Binance is a unique ecosystem of decentralized, blockchain-based networks. The company has grown to be the leading crypto exchange in a number of countries, and their side organizations are attracting significant interest as well. One of the biggest competitive advantages Binance has is its drive for development. While the company started only as a crypto exchange back in 2017, today, Binance has spread its services among numerous different spheres. According to the company website, its mission is to become the infrastructure services provider for the entire blockchain ecosystem. Since launching the BNB, the exchange has also benefited from increased investor interest in the coin. BNB went through a significant price increase at the beginning of 2021, which has put it on the map of enterprise investors. Measures like BEP-95 have upgraded the already deflationary tokenomics to make BNB even more deflationary. Following the proposal, gas fees on Binance Smart Chain have become even lower, as the network burns a part of the fees to decentralize further. The proposal was modeled after Ethereum's famous EIP-1559. This has helped Binance overcome several exploits of protocols on BSC, such as a $200M exploit of Pancake Bunny and several hacks of Cream Finance. Despite these hacks, users return to Binance for its low fees and the abundance of lucrative meme coins in its ecosystem.

Within the crypto industry, a coin burn is a deflationary mechanism that is used to permanently remove coins from circulation. Most cryptocurrency projects, including Binance, periodically burn coins to sustain the value of their digital asset and create a deflationary effect. In the case of Binance, the crypto exchange began the program in late 2017 and has so far burned over 38 million tokens via its quarterly burn to date. The crypto exchange has in mind to destroy up to 100 million BNB tokens through its quarterly burns, accounting for 50% of its circulating supply. BNB utilizes two coin-burning mechanisms. The first mechanism consists of burning a portion of the tokens spent on transaction fees on the BNB Chain, and the second is its quarterly BNB burning events. Previously, the quarterly burn event was based on revenue generated from the Binance centralized exchange. But under the new BNB Auto-Burn program, the number of tokens to be burned is calculated using a formula based on the total number of blocks produced on the Binance Smart Chain and BNB's average dollar-denominated price during the quarter. As of July 2022, Binance had completed 20 BNB coin burn events. In total, 38,683,447.66 BNB tokens have been destroyed, reducing its initial 200M supply by 19.34%.

There is an initial maximum supply of 200,000,000 BNB coins, of which 168,137,036 are currently in circulation as of September 2021. Binance conducts quarterly burning of the BNB supply, with the goal of reducing the total supply by half — or 100,000,000 BNB. On July 18, 2021, it conducted its 16th quarterly burning, which was worth $390 million in BNB price at the time of burning. However, that was not the most expensive burn — on April 16, 2021, the exchange burned nearly $600 million worth, in BNB price at the time of burning. According to the Binance whitepaper, exactly half of the maximum supply of BNB coins was allocated towards the initial coin offering (ICO) and public sale of the coin. The ICO was held in July 2017 shortly after the exchange launched, and saw Binance raise $15 million in funding, with BNB price at $0.10 during the ICO. Taking BNB price today, that represents an almost 4200X return on investment (ROI). Another 40% of the total supply, or around 80,000,000 BNB coins, was distributed among the founding members and team. Finally, the remaining 10% of the maximum supply was split among angel investors.

Initially, the BNB started as a traditional ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Later on, the company introduced its own blockchain, and the tokens started being issued from the Binance blockchain, secured by the Tendermint byzantine-fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism. While ERC-20 tokens rely on the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, which allows them to be extremely scalable, and allows for the creation of smart contracts. Unlike PoS, the Binance blockchain does not support smart contract functionalities. In contrast, the Bitcoin blockchain is secured by the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, which is far more limited and consumes large amounts of electrical and computing power.

As the dedicated utility token of the Binance exchange, the most straightforward way to acquire BNB coins would be to purchase them through Binance. The original exchange supports the largest variety of trading pairs with BNB, and it also has the best trading rates for the coin. Since the launch of Play2Earn games, interest in the BNB to PHP price has increased substantially. To check BNB price live in the fiat currency of your choice, you can use CoinMarketCap’s converter feature directly on the BNB currency page. Alternatively, use the dedicated exchange rate converter page. Popular BNB price pairs include: BNB/USD, BNB/GBP, BNB/AUD, BNB/CNY, BNB/JPY and BNB/EUR. Cryptocurrency newbie? You can read more about how to enter the market and how to buy BTC, BNB or any other token in CoinMarketCap education portal — Alexandria.

Toncoin (TON) is a decentralized layer-1 blockchain developed in 2018 by the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. The project was then abandoned, taken over by the TON Foundation, and renamed from "Telegram Open Network" to "The Open Network". Since 2020, the technology has been developing thanks to a non-commercial group of supporters and an independent community of enthusiasts who called themselves the TON Foundation. Toncoin, formerly known as Gram, is the native cryptocurrency of the TON network. The original idea was to integrate TON into an easy-to-use application that allows users to buy/send/store funds. Clients pay transaction fees and use TON to settle payments or validate transactions. Toncoin utilizes the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model for network scalability and reliability. According to the project website, the platform provides its customers with fast, transparent and secure payment services, facilitating transactions with minimal fees and third-party applications. The developers’ mission is to build a full-fledged ecosystem with decentralized storage, decentralized services, a domain name system (DNS equivalent), an anonymous network, an instant payment platform, and affordable/fast transaction processing. The Open Network is a community-driven blockchain with a flexible architecture and focus on serving a typical consumer. TON stands out due to the fast processing/validation of transactions per second (TPS). In September 2021, the network processed a then-world record of 55,000 TPS during a contest, although the current TPS could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. This feature allows the project to grow rapidly while avoiding performance losses. At the same time, the project does not harm the environment.

Originally, the blockchain platform was created by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, and developed by the Telegram team. Telegram planned to launch an on-chain token called Gram and establish a platform for decentralized applications (dApps). Gram was getting a lot of attention, which started to cause trouble. Its development was prohibited by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Gram was considered securities, and the SEC banned the release of Gram tokens. The Telegram team brought TON to the state of an almost full-fledged product. However, in 2020, Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, left the project, and the development was handed over to independent crypto enthusiasts. From the very beginning, the project was created as an open-source code so anyone could continue the development. The current network was launched and developed by Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelianenko, members of the community called NewTON (later the TON Foundation).

TON has a multi-level structure built on the principle of sharding or segmentation ("blockchain within a blockchain"). A sharding feature involves the use of multiple subnets (shards) on the same blockchain, where each shard has a specific purpose. It allows the net to avoid the accumulation of unverified blocks and speeds up tasks. The TON network consists of the master, work and shard chains. The developers focus on scalability, efficiency and mass adoption. Due to the well-established interaction between segments, the network provides ultra-fast transactions, verifying and processing a massive amount of TPS. The TON network offers the following services: TON Wallets, a built-in wallet function designed to transfer funds and interact with platform services and offers two categories of wallets: custodial and non-custodial; TON Services allows developers to create various dApps while users can access third-party apps through a user-friendly interface; TON Storage offers the benefits of private encryption using the private key of the owner's wallet; TON Proxy uses all platform components and allows clients to access the TON blockchain via decentralized VPNs; TON DNS (decentralized name system) makes it possible for traditional websites to work in the TON network, allowing users to set short, readable names.

The TON network has its native token, Toncoin, with a circulating supply of 1.22B TON and a maximum supply of 5B TON. Toncoin was designed to fuel the ecosystem. It can be used to build decentralized applications (dApps), act as a transaction processing fee, as a cross-chain transaction fee, and as a staking payment to secure the blockchain and services. The list of use cases also includes payment for decentralized data storage, TON DNS/TON Proxy, and other fees within decentralized services. Validator fees are also paid in TON. In addition, people can vote with TON for changes and development within TON's governance program.