November 28 date set for USDT availability on Bitcoin via RGB, according to Binance News
Key Facts
USDT via the RGB protocol on the Bitcoin network is scheduled to become publicly available on November 28, 2026, according to a post by the official Binance News account on October 22. The date follows Utexo's opening of early access to Utexo Mint for approved operators to test minting, private transfers and redemption in a test environment before launch. This is a different route from issuing USDT via the Omni Layer, which Tether used on Bitcoin in earlier stages. Tether first announced its plan to launch the currency on RGB on August 28, 2025, without setting a date at the time. The new announcement sets a specific public date, but attributes it to Binance News, while Tether's earlier announcement describes RGB's benefits without independently confirming the availability date.
Utexo's mechanism, according to its product page, involves locking USDT or USDT0 on the source network and then minting the equivalent amount on Bitcoin. The company says every USDT minted on Bitcoin is backed 1:1 by USDT0 locked on Arbitrum. This means the described issuance does not create units without a corresponding asset, but links them to assets locked on another network through a lock-and-mint mechanism. Utexo charges a fee of 0.1% on each transfer through Utexo Mint, in addition to source-network fees. It also says transfer data remains with the parties to the transaction, with the option of selective disclosure for compliance, audit and reporting purposes. These terms place the issuance mechanism, fees and transfer-data privacy among the product features disclosed before public availability.
In its announcement about RGB, Tether said users would be able to hold and transfer USD₮ and Bitcoin through the same wallet, and that the design enables value to be sent and received offline. Chief Executive Paolo Ardoino described the currency the company is targeting as "lightweight, private and scalable," and said Bitcoin deserves a stablecoin designed to be native to the network. These features reflect Tether's description of the design; its announcement alone did not identify the wallets and platforms that would support the service at launch. The RGB team said Utexo named UniSat as a wallet launch partner on September 4, 2026. According to the RGB Association's account of Utexo's announcement, the wallet will support sending, receiving and swapping USDT, while it has more than one million weekly active users and more than 100 million API requests a week. The wallet's release date had not been announced when that announcement was published.
Tether's connection to Bitcoin dates back to the Omni Layer, which the company said was the first transport layer it used in 2014. But it announced that it would stop minting USD₮ via Omni effective August 17, 2023, after trading platforms favored alternative transport layers, according to the company's explanation for declining use of Omni. In an update dated August 29, 2025, Tether said it would stop direct issuance and redemption on five legacy chains, including Omni, while transfers between wallets would remain possible. The announced RGB route therefore differs from continuing issuance via Omni: it concerns issuance on another protocol within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Tether said RGB reached mainnet with version 0.11.1. In an update published by the RGB Association in October 2026, 0.11.1 remained the latest stable release, while release candidate 0.11.2-rc.1 was under testing.
The plan comes as Tether reported that outstanding USD₮ tokens reached about $184.6 billion at the end of the second quarter of 2026, up about $446 million from the end of the first quarter, and that the currency's share exceeded 60% of the stablecoin market. The company said the quarterly report was prepared by BDO and presents the assets backing USD₮ as of June 30, 2026. These figures provide context on the scale of the currency the company plans to make available via RGB, but do not measure expected use on Bitcoin or demand for the new service. On the technical infrastructure side, the RGB Association announced on August 28, 2026, that Utexo had added a Lightning module for RGB assets to Tether's wallet development kit, describing it as a step toward production readiness. That announcement by itself does not specify the scope of commercial availability or the number of entities that will support transfers at launch.
According to Binance News, Utexo is planning a second phase in the first quarter of 2027 to extend USDT to the Lightning network for payments. This would follow the planned public availability date of November 28, 2026, after a period of early access and testing for approved operators. Wallet and platform support, as well as the redemption mechanism, remain operational details of interest to users and launch participants. Tether's official source, which outlined the RGB plan, did not announce a November date; Binance News attributed it to the launch schedule it reported. The same account described the extension to Lightning as a later phase planned for the first quarter of 2027.