Tether’s New Business: Helping Small Countries Issue Stablecoins

By Xiao Bing, TechFlow

On May 25, stablecoin issuer Tether announced a partnership with the Government of Georgia to launch GEL₮, a lari-pegged stablecoin.

The press release reads conventionally: lower costs, faster settlements, and enhanced cross-border payments. CEO Paolo Ardoino repeated his oft-stated line:Stablecoins are becoming the infrastructure of global finance.

Placing this announcement within Tether’s activities over the past 24 months reveals a clear strategy: Tether is systematically acquiring the on-chain issuance interfaces and global distribution channels for small countries’ currencies—one by one.

Tether’s Product Line Is, in Fact, a Map of “White-Label Stablecoin” Services

Lay out Tether’s portfolio: USDT, with a $189 billion market cap—the world’s largest stablecoin—but inaccessible to U.S. users; USAT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin launched earlier this year for compliance with the GENIUS Act; EURT, its euro-pegged stablecoin, effectively sidelined by MiCA and scheduled to cease redemptions in November 2025; MXNT, pegged to the Mexican peso; CNHT, pegged to offshore RMB—consistently low in scale; and GEL₮, the newly announced lari-pegged stablecoin.

Viewed by currency, the lineup appears haphazard—but the strategic intent is unmistakable. Tether is testing one core proposition:Outside the dominant U.S. dollar channel, can “issuing sovereign-currency stablecoins on behalf of nations” be turned into a replicable, standardized business?

USDT secures Tether’s position as the de facto global dollar shadow currency; USAT and EURT represent regulatory-compliance experiments in highly supervised markets; while MXNT, CNHT, and GEL₮ share three distinct traits: weak internationalization of their underlying fiat, expensive cross-border payments, and high dependence on remittances—yet not so isolated (e.g., like Iran or North Korea) as to be entirely excluded from the global financial system.

Georgia is the latest and most current case study of this playbook.

Why Is Georgia Willing to Sign?

With a population of 3.7 million and GDP of approximately $35 billion—smaller than Kunming—it nonetheless meets three critical conditions.

It has acute pain points. According to IMF data, remittances have accounted for roughly 15% of Georgia’s GDP over the past decade, and 40–45% of recipient households’ monthly income comes from remittances—primarily originating from Russia, Greece, and the United States. Every traditional wire transfer incurs real cost and time loss for these families. A functional on-chain lari would deliver tangible welfare benefits to ordinary citizens.

A compliant regulatory framework is already in place. The National Bank of Georgia spent years building a comprehensive digital asset regulatory framework—covering reserve requirements, redemption rights, issuer oversight, and anti-money laundering (AML) rules—and proactively aligned it with the U.S. GENIUS Act. This was deliberate: Georgia aims to position itself as the digital asset hub of the Caucasus region.

Preliminary groundwork has already been laid. Georgia signed an MOU with Tether in 2023, conducted a pilot for a digital lari with Ripple the same year, and later entered into a cooperation agreement with Hedera. GEL₮ did not emerge out of thin air.

The logic is clear:Leverage Tether’s global distribution network to accelerate the internationalization of its own currency.

Georgia could issue its own CBDC—but even the fastest CBDC only circulates within its domestic system. By integrating with Tether’s network, the lari gains direct interoperability with USDT and USDC in shared liquidity pools, and becomes holdable in any crypto wallet. In effect, Georgia trades its regulatory framework for access to Tether’s pre-built global infrastructure.

What Does Tether Gain?

Georgia is simply too small. Its annual remittance market is under $5 billion; adding domestic payments yields at most tens of billions in potential stablecoin circulation—a rounding error against USDT’s $189 billion.

So Tether isn’t after Georgia itself—it’s after thetemplate.

Each additional country strengthens and refines this “sovereign-currency stablecoin issuance” solution. Once GEL₮’s compliance architecture, reserve mechanism, and redemption process are proven, the next countries—Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Nigeria—can replicate it directly, compressing implementation timelines from years down to months.

The real moat lies deeper.When a nation’s sovereign-currency stablecoin trades directly against USDT within the same liquidity network, that nation’s currency is quietly integrated into an informal, USDT-anchored dollar system. Tether need not compete for central bank decision-making authority—it merely ensures it remains the indispensable intermediary router.

This logic mirrors 19th-century London’s financial export model: London banks didn’t serve as colonial central banks—they simply extended layers of clearing, discounting, and foreign exchange systems across the empire, compelling everyone to operate on London’s rails. The difference? Then it was unilateral colonialism; now it’s bilateral, voluntary adoption.Small nations sign willingly—they can’t wait for SWIFT modernization; Tether acts willingly—it seeks to lock in a pivotal role within the next-generation financial infrastructure.

Sovereign Currency Outsourcing

The digital euro has been mired in public consultation for five years, tangled among MiCA, the ECB, and national central banks.

Georgia—a country whose GDP is smaller than Kunming’s—has bypassed the entire “national CBDC issuance” process via a single contract with a private company, placing its national currency directly onto the same global circulation track as USDT.

If this pattern repeats across ten or twenty small nations over the next three years, it will signal the emergence of a new international financial order:the outsourcing of sovereign currency globalization to private stablecoin issuers.

But this path carries costs.

First is monetary sovereignty risk. If liquidity, wallet access, and transaction routing for the sovereign-currency stablecoin all depend on Tether, how does the nation’s central bank’s visibility into and control over monetary circulation change? There is no definitive answer yet.

In the future, if half of Georgian households receive remittances in GEL₮, then any reserve crisis confronting Tether would threaten not only Tether’s balance sheet—but also Georgian social stability.

Second, if all small nations’ sovereign-currency stablecoins ultimately rely on USDT for cross-border conversion, then although they appear to be “local currencies on-chain,” they may in practice deepen integration into a USDT-centric on-chain dollar system. For nations pursuing this path amid anti-dollarization rhetoric, this presents a paradox worth confronting upfront.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has repeatedly warned over the past two years about the implications of private stablecoins for monetary sovereignty and financial stability—for good reason.

GEL₮’s issuance structure, reserve custodian, and underlying blockchain choice remain undisclosed. These details will determine whether it qualifies as a genuinely “sovereign-backed stablecoin” or merely a conventional Tether product branded with government endorsement.

Yet there is an observation more important than those technical details:Over the next 12 months, will a second, third, or even fourth country adopt the same template and sign a similar agreement with Tether?

If yes, Tether will evolve from a stablecoin issuer into a cross-sovereign financial infrastructure provider—offering sovereign-currency stablecoin issuance services to nation-states.

This is a category we previously lacked words to describe—not a bank, not a central bank, not a payment company, nor a typical stablecoin issuer, but rather across-sovereign, on-chain minting organization built through regulatory arbitrage, network effects, and technological standardization.

Looking back three years from now, the contract signed on May 25, 2026, may prove more consequential than any other crypto news item that week.