I have a confession to make. When I first saw that Tether—the behemoth behind the $110 billion USDT stablecoin—was the primary financial backer of Holepunch, Keet, and the Bare JavaScript runtime, my brain short-circuited.
I struggled with the cognitive dissonance. Why? Because if you have ever written a smart contract that interacts with USDT on Ethereum Mainnet, you know it is an absolute nightmare.
Before we can talk about Tether’s brilliant vision for a decentralized, serverless future, we have to talk about the trauma they inflicted on a generation of Solidity developers.
1. The Original Sin: USDT is not actually an ERC-20
When you are deep in protocol-level engineering, you rely on standards. EIP-20 explicitly states that a token's transfer and transferFrom functions must return a boolean value to indicate success or failure.
