USDT/USD price feed

One market has towered over this composition for as long as the feed has read it: USDT against USDC. The pools where the two largest on-chain dollars trade directly against each other clear large size at very tight spreads; together they form the closest thing DeFi has to a currency cross.

A cross is an instrument in its own right. When USDT/USDC moves away from one, the market is saying that one of the two dollars is repricing; the surrounding legs show which. On 12 May 2022, during the week an algorithmic stablecoin collapsed, USDT briefly traded as low as ninety-five cents on some venues before recovering while USDC held its peg. The cross is where that difference was visible.

None of that requires drama to be useful. On an ordinary day the cross simply supplies the deepest, tightest reading available for the pair; the method takes it at the weight the market gives it: no more, no less. The rest of the weight comes from everywhere else: Ether pairs, Bitcoin pairs, BNB, plus dozens of smaller dollars, each a reading taken from outside the cross.

Every major asset in this catalog has its own geography; USDT's is distinctive. Its map has been drawn by Ethereum plus BNB Chain far more than by the newer networks that shape other dollar books in this catalog. Same economy, entirely different map, with Solana, Arbitrum plus the rest of the long tail filling in the edges.

The BNB Chain side tells its own story. Part of it has traded against BNB itself rather than against other dollars, on venues with a distinctly retail profile. That flow is part of what USDT is, so it is part of the feed: the composition reports the asset's actual constituency.

Nobody designed this map. USDT has lived on these networks for years and its holders have voted with their liquidity the whole time; the feed counts the votes. A method that weighted every stablecoin the same way would describe none of them, which is why each pair's page in this catalog shows a different picture.

This has been a concentrated composition; the honest way to present that is plainly: the deepest markets have carried an outsized share of the total weight. The dollar cross has simply been that dominant on-chain.

Concentration here is information rather than a flaw to engineer away. Weighting follows observed liquidity, so the biggest markets earn the largest say, exactly as they do for anyone actually trading the pair. Inflating the tail to look diversified would misstate the market this page claims to describe.

The tail still earns its place. A long file of smaller pools across many chains sits underneath the giants, contributing little weight but broad coverage: independent venues on independent networks whose readings would diverge quickly if any single market stopped reflecting reality. Their role is the control group, not the headline.

USDT's infrastructure is in the middle of a shift. USDT0, the newer omnichain deployment standard, has gone live on new networks; Plasma, a chain built around stablecoin settlement, has run pools this feed reads. Venues like these enter the composition at whatever small weights they actually trade.

A migration like that asks nothing of a feed computed from observation: as liquidity arrives on the new venues, their weight grows inside the same computation that watches the older ones. Whoever settles against this rate keeps getting the same thing throughout, the price of USDT wherever it happens to trade that year.

There is also something worth watching in it. A new settlement network earning weight pool by pool is the kind of structural change a quarterly market report would catch months late; this page moves at the cadence the chains do.