Tether's USAT token surpassed 140 million units in its latest reserve attestation, a roughly 540% jump from the prior month's supply, according to reporting by The Block, which cited an attestation issued by Anchorage Digital Bank. The figure confirms the sharpest growth rate since the token launched in January 2026 and may signal that Tether is gaining traction in the US institutional stablecoin market it was built for.

Live on-chain data corroborates the trend. As of May 28, CoinGecko shows approximately 160 million USAT in circulation, with a market cap of around $159.4 million. CoinMarketCap puts the figure at roughly 157.6 million tokens. USAT is trading at $0.9986, effectively on its $1.00 peg. The gap between the attestation figure (140 million) and the current live supply likely reflects minting that occurred after the attestation was finalized, suggesting continued demand.

Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., the first federally chartered crypto-native bank in the United States, supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, issues USAT and provides the reserve attestations. Reserves are held entirely in US dollar cash and reverse repurchase agreements backed by short-term US Treasuries, in segregated fiduciary trust accounts, with Cantor Fitzgerald serving as custodian. There is no rehypothecation and no leverage. The first attestation carried a snapshot date of January 31, 2026, and was published in early March 2026 following review by Deloitte. It showed $17.6 million in reserves backing $17.5 million in tokens, with a surplus of approximately $103,000, representing roughly 0.6% overcollateralisation. Readers should note that an attestation verifies reserves at a specific point in time; it is not a continuous audit of day-to-day compliance.

USAT was designed from the ground up to comply with the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act), signed into law by President Trump on July 18, 2025. That law requires 1:1 reserve backing in short-duration, low-risk assets, regular independent attestations, and issuance through licensed entities. GENIUS Act implementation rules are due by July 18, 2026. Tether built USAT as a product explicitly suited to those requirements, separating it from its flagship USDT token, which operates globally across multiple blockchains without a single regulatory home.

"USAT offers institutions an additional option: a dollar-backed token made in America," Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said at launch. Bo Hines, CEO of Tether USA₮, went further in February at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York: "This year, I think we'll end up being a top 10 purchaser of T-bills." He added: "We're obviously increasing the amount of T-bills we have in our reserves as we move towards this GENIUS compliance standard."

For context, the overall stablecoin market is substantial. USDT alone holds a circulating supply of roughly $189.6 billion. USDC, operated by Circle, sits at about $77.6 billion. Circle holds a French MiCA licence and uses Deloitte for its own attestations, making USAT's adoption of Deloitte a direct signal of Tether's intent to compete for the same institutional trust. USAT at $160 million is a rounding error relative to both. But the growth rate matters: from $10 million at launch to over $140 million in attestation data, in four months, with the steepest climb coming in the most recent period. The scale of Tether's existing Treasury exposure adds further context: the company holds the 17th-largest position in US Treasuries globally, ahead of Germany and Israel, with 83.11% of total reserves in T-bills as of December 31, 2025 ($122.32 billion). That position makes the T-bill purchasing forecast from Hines something more than rhetoric.

The regional implications are not limited to the United States, and two developments make that clear.

On April 1, 2026, Tether expanded USAT from Ethereum to the Celo blockchain. Celo was built with mobile-first, low-data users in mind and counts more than 4.2 million active weekly users. Its integration with Opera MiniPay, a lightweight mobile wallet with 14 million users concentrated heavily in Africa, gives USAT a distribution path into markets that rarely intersect with US regulatory products. Governance on Celo is expected to consider USAT as a gas currency, meaning it could be used to pay transaction fees directly. Google Cloud and Self, a privacy-preserving identity faucet, are infrastructure partners for the rollout.

In parallel, Tether co-led a $4.4 million seed round in Sorted Wallet in May 2026, alongside Gnosis. Sorted is a non-custodial stablecoin wallet built specifically for feature phones and low-end Android devices. It has over 500,000 downloads and operates primarily in Nigeria, Kenya, Bangladesh, and Tanzania. The same month, Tether made a strategic investment in LemFi, a remittance platform backed to integrate USDT into African and Asian remittance corridors.

These moves illustrate a two-track approach. USAT addresses US institutional demand for a compliant, attested, Treasury-backed dollar token. The Sorted and LemFi investments address users across emerging markets who rely on USDT for savings, remittances, and inflation protection. South Asian crypto volume grew 80% year-over-year to roughly $300 billion through mid-2025. Sub-Saharan African crypto adoption grew 52% in 2025, with Nigeria anchoring the region. Nigeria alone receives approximately $20 billion in annual remittances, primarily from US, UK, and EU diaspora. USDT on Tron remains the dominant vehicle in those markets, with transaction fees running 0.5 to 2% compared to 5 to 12% for traditional remittance services.

The unanswered questions are practical ones. Anchorage has not publicly confirmed a fixed attestation schedule, and Deloitte reviews add credibility but come with a lag. Whether the current USAT supply growth is driven by institutional OTC minting or more distributed demand remains unclear. For developers building on Celo in Africa or South Asia, the key near-term signal to watch is whether USAT achieves gas-currency status on that chain and whether non-US exchanges begin offering direct fiat on-ramps for the token. If either happens, USAT crosses from a US compliance product into something with real emerging-market utility.