USDT and USDC Differ in Reserves, Chains and Admin Controls, Developers Warn

Developers who treat USDT and USDC as interchangeable $1 tokens risk mispricing and loss, since the two come from different issuers with different reserve makeups. USDT, issued by Tether, is the larger coin with a bigger reserve cushion that includes volatile assets, while USDC, issued by Circle, is backed mostly by liquid government money market funds and bank cash. Both have briefly lost their dollar peg in past episodes, which argues for pricing stablecoins from market feeds and alerting on drift. The same ticker can exist as separate contracts across many networks, so token registries should be keyed by chain and contract address and decimals should be read from each contract. Both issuers can also blacklist addresses at the contract level, meaning a user's balance can be frozen even though they hold the keys.