Many people haven't realized this issue, but once you understand it, it can be somewhat upsetting.

That pile of USDT in your hands looks like just a number, sitting still in your wallet. But in reality? It’s continuously generating returns for others, while you get not a single cent.

How does the company behind USDT, Tether, operate? You deposit 1 US dollar and get 1 USDT. What does Tether do with this real money? It buys US government bonds. Over a year, it earns hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, more than most publicly listed companies. This number isn’t made up; it’s a real event.

In the early days, people didn’t think much about this logic—anyway, USDT can be exchanged for cash and used for trading, who cares where the returns go? It wasn’t until the DeFi ecosystem exploded that more and more people suddenly realized: all the returns generated by the money I deposit end up in someone else’s pocket?

It all boils down to a simple passive income model. Tether steadily earns 4%-5% from government bond yields, while users holding USDT get no dividends or interest, effectively lending money for free to generate wealth. This is what’s called Stablecoin 1.0—a one-stop, straightforward approach.

Later, some people couldn’t accept this. Recently, a major exchange executive publicly supported a new type of stablecoin product( like USDe). This new scheme started offering rebates to users, which sounds quite conscientious. But the pitfalls are obvious—liquidity isn’t deep enough, and selling might require converting back to USDT first, incurring transaction costs; cross-chain deployment isn’t complete, making transfers cumbersome. There’s still a long way to go before new competitors can fully replace the existing ones.