New data from Tether reveals that the number of people who have adopted the firm’s USDT is now equivalent to the entire population of the United States.

In a new blog post, Tether says the largest dollar-pegged digital asset by market cap now has over 330 million users, not including those that solely use it on centralized exchange platforms such as Coinbase or Binance.

“USDT has seen significant adoption, with 330 million on-chain wallets and accounts, a proxy for users, ever receiving USDT by the end of Q3 2024 – that is equivalent to the population of the USA.

And this does not include people that only use USDT on centralized platforms, of which there are several tens of millions more according to our partners.”

According to Tether, the adoption rate of USDT is accelerating as the last four quarters have shown an average increase rate of 9%.

“The remarkable growth in users keeps on accelerating, with every quarter adding more users than the last. In fact, the last four quarters have seen an average increase of 9%. Q3 of 2024 was our best yet, welcoming 36.25 million users.”

Tether defines a “user” as either someone doing activity on-chain or an entity on a centralized exchange. But since it can’t count the number of off-chain users, Tether says the number of USDT users is likely significantly higher than what they found.

“To get the complete picture, we should add in off-chain accounts, which are known only to centralized platforms. Our partners indicate there are several tens of millions of these accounts, meaning the true number of USDT users is even higher than what we present here.”