Tether (USDT) Supply Hits New High Amid Heightened Market Activity

TheCryptoTimesPubblicato 2025-10-16Pubblicato ultima volta 2025-10-16

The supply of Tether (USDT) stablecoin is growing, with it now sitting at 181 billion in circulation. The recent mintings added over 4.5 billion in USDT supply to meet rising demand from institutions and on-chain trading, showing that stablecoins remain a key part of crypto markets.

As per DeFiLlama data, USDT supply currently amounts to total $181.406 billion, suggesting the total supply as 181.4 billion as each token is backed by $1 in collateral. It dominates the stablecoin sector with nearly 60% shares, followed by Circle’s USDC with 24.6% and a supply of 75.7 billion tokens. 

Stablecoins Overview - Defilama
Source: DeFiLlama

Surge in stablecoin supply in 2025 

The stablecoin market has experienced a remarkable surge in supply throughout 2025. It was largely driven by growing institutional adoption, favorable regulatory developments, and increasing demand for stable digital assets. By mid-2025, the total stablecoin supply surpassed $300 billion and it is projected to increase to $ 400 billion by year-end at this pace of growth. 

This surge, highlighted by a record $15.6 trillion in transfer volumes during Q3 2025, underscores stablecoins’ role as a cornerstone of the digital economy, particularly in DeFi and cross-border payments. 

Ethereum’s dominance in hosting 69% of new issuances, coupled with centralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC accounting for 90% of the market, reflects the sector’s robust expansion, potentially catalyzing broader cryptocurrency market growth as adoption reaches a mainstream tipping point. 

Stablecoins are increasingly bridging traditional finance and decentralized networks. It also enables cross-border stablecoin transfers, reducing settlement times from days to hours and lowering fees from about 2% to 0.3%. By combining regulatory compliance with automated DeFi processes, it shows how stablecoins can be used beyond basic trading.

Also Read: Mastercard, Chainlink Use CCIP to Bring Payments Onchain


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A 10,000-Word Interpretation of the "Optical Interconnect" Industry Chain: The AI Infrastructure Bottleneck Obscured by GPU Glare

**Summary: The Rise of Optical Interconnect in AI Infrastructure** This analysis explores the critical, yet often overlooked, role of optical interconnects in large-scale AI data centers. While GPUs provide raw computational power, the efficiency of AI clusters depends heavily on high-speed data transfer between thousands of cooperating GPUs during both training and inference tasks. Copper-based electrical connections are hitting physical limits in bandwidth, distance, and power consumption. Fiber optics, using light signals, offer a superior solution with exponentially higher bandwidth and lower energy use over longer distances. This shift is driving rapid growth in the optical interconnect market. The core translation device is the pluggable optical transceiver (or module), which converts electrical signals from GPUs into optical signals for fiber transmission and vice versa. Its manufacturing involves two distinct semiconductor domains: indium phosphide (InP) for optical chips (lasers, modulators, detectors) and silicon for digital signal processing (DSP) chips. A transformative next-generation technology is Co-Packaged Optics (CPO). CPO moves the optical engine (a silicon photonic integrated circuit, or PIC) much closer to the GPU or switch inside the same chip package, drastically reducing power loss and latency. CPO necessitates an external laser source and relies on silicon photonics (using Silicon-on-Insulator/SOI wafers) for integration with silicon chips. The optical interconnect ecosystem is highly fragmented, unlike the concentrated GPU market. Key bottlenecks and players span the entire supply chain: InP substrates (e.g., AXT), epitaxial wafers (e.g., IQE), laser chips (e.g., Sivers, Lumentum, Coherent), silicon photonics foundries (e.g., Tower Semiconductor), SOI wafers (e.g., Soitec), DSP/switch chips (e.g., Broadcom, Marvell), and underlying fiber (e.g., Corning). The article posits that AI infrastructure competition is extending from "who has more GPUs" to "who can secure the scarce optical interconnect supply chain." CPO represents the largest potential growth variable, with projections suggesting it could become a market worth tens of billions of dollars by 2028. Investment opportunities vary from conservative (large, diversified players) to aggressive (small, high-beta companies focused on specific bottleneck technologies), but the sector carries significant volatility and execution risks.

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A 10,000-Word Interpretation of the "Optical Interconnect" Industry Chain: The AI Infrastructure Bottleneck Obscured by GPU Glare

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a16z: RWA Has Passed the Proof of Concept, but the Real Challenges Are Just Beginning

a16z highlights that the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market, excluding stablecoins, has grown tenfold in under two years to roughly $340 billion. This surge is primarily driven by US Treasury bonds and gold, offering investors yield on idle stablecoins and providing institutions with more efficient settlement and collateral flows. However, the core insight is that most tokenized assets today are simply digital certificates for off-chain holdings—used for ownership and transfer but not deeply integrated into DeFi as composable financial building blocks. For instance, only about 5% of tokenized bonds ($8B) are actively used in DeFi protocols. Smaller categories like reinsurance tokens show much higher DeFi utilization (84%), indicating they were designed for on-chain composability from the start. The market remains concentrated, with US Treasuries and commodities comprising two-thirds of the total. Gold dominates the commodities segment. While Ethereum holds over half the market, activity is spreading across multiple chains like BNB Chain and Solana. Predictions for the market's future size vary widely (from $2 trillion to over $30 trillion by 2030/2034), reflecting different definitions of what constitutes tokenization. All agree on significant growth. The current market is minuscule compared to traditional finance (e.g., tokenized bonds are 0.01% of the global bond market). The key takeaway is that the initial "proof-of-concept" phase for moving familiar assets on-chain is proving successful. The next, harder challenge is moving more complex financial instruments onto blockchains and enabling true on-chain composability, where these assets become programmable components within a native digital financial system, rather than just digitized records.

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a16z: RWA Has Passed the Proof of Concept, but the Real Challenges Are Just Beginning

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The Wind of 'Proactive' AI Blows into Silicon Valley: Hark Secures $700 Million in Funding

Hark, an AI startup founded in late 2025, has raised $700 million in Series A funding at a $6 billion valuation. Led by Parkway Venture Capital with participation from NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, the company aims to develop next-generation human-computer interfaces using a combination of proprietary foundational models and custom-built AI-native hardware. Founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock, Hark envisions a system of multimodal devices equipped with agentic capabilities, end-to-end voice models, and personalized memory. This "active" AI approach seeks to move beyond passive chatbots, creating collaborative companions that anticipate needs and interact naturally within the real world. Adcock's experience with Figure, a humanoid robotics company, informs this hardware-focused venture. The article argues that while current AI is powerful, it remains confined to screens and traditional interfaces like chat. The next paradigm shift requires dedicated hardware that is always-on, possesses persistent memory, and enables intuitive interaction, potentially rivaling the impact of the iPhone. Hark is assembling a team with talent from Apple, Meta, Google, and Tesla to tackle this complex engineering challenge across models, hardware, and interaction design. Finally, the piece suggests Chinese startups may have an advantage in this "active" AI hardware space due to strong manufacturing ecosystems, a vast domestic market, and supportive government policies, framing the competition as one that requires integrated progress in models, operating systems, and devices.

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The Wind of 'Proactive' AI Blows into Silicon Valley: Hark Secures $700 Million in Funding

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