Stablecoin project Tether is expanding the list of fiat currencies that can be pegged against its crypto status. Tether will be releasing a stablecoin pegged to UK’s British Pound (GBP). The identification symbol of this altcoin has been decided as GBPT. This project will be based on the Ethereum blockchain during its initial roll-out. In later months however, other blockchain networks could be added to support GBPT. The precursor to Tether, originally named ‘Realcoin’, was announced in 2014 by co-founders Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, and Craig Sellars as a Santa Monica, US-based start-up. It is already pegged to the US dollar, USDT, and is operational in the US.
“Tether Operations Limited (Tether) has announced that it will be launching Tether tokens (GBP₮) pegged to the British Pound Sterling in early July. GBPT will be a stable digital asset that is pegged 1:1 to the British Pound Sterling,” the company said in an official blog post.
Tether’s UK-focussed initiative comes almost two months after the country legalised stablecoins as an official payment mode.
Stablecoins, like Tether and Binance USD, are crypto assets pegged to reserve assets like gold or fiat currencies. So, even if the crypto market is down, they can still see gains due to the performance of its underlaying asset.
“GBPT will join four other fiat-currency pegged tokens Tether has in the market: the US dollar-pegged USDT, the Euro-pegged EURT, the offshore Chinese Yuan-pegged CNHT, as well as the recently launched MXNT, the Mexican Peso-pegged stablecoin,” Tether’s blog-post added.
With this, GBPT will also bring UK’s fiat on the blockchain network. This will make for a significant step in UK’s Web3 adoption.
“The UK is the next frontier for blockchain innovation and the wider implementation of cryptocurrency for financial markets,” Paolo Ardoino, the chief technical officer of Tether said in a statement.
Since its inception, Tether has grown to be among the larger stablecoin projects in terms of market valuation.
As per CoinMarketCap, the market valuation of USDT is $67 billion (roughly Rs. 5,24,760 crore).