USDT is disappearing from regulated European platforms, but there is still little evidence that the shift has weakened Tether’s global demand.
Europe’s clampdown on Tether’s flagship stablecoin is moving into a new stage. Revolut told European users it will delist USDT after Aug. 31, adding itself to a growing list of platforms limiting access to the world’s largest stablecoin as companies adapt to the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, or MiCA.
MiCA’s stablecoin rules have been rolling out since 2024, and the EU-wide transition period ended on July 1. That deadline increased pressure on platforms to remove tokens that do not meet the new requirements.
Still, data cited from Artemis Analytics suggests that pushing Tether out of a major market has not triggered a major change in overall USDT activity. Cointelegraph Magazine said Artemis researcher Alex Weseley pointed to little sign that Europe’s tighter rules have materially altered global usage patterns.
Stablecoins are moving beyond trading and savings
One reason USDT demand appears resilient is that dollar stablecoins are being used for much more than trading or storing value in other parts of the world.
The report points to Argentina, a country with a long history of households holding dollars outside the traditional financial system. Even as restrictions on access to actual US dollars have eased, stablecoin activity has kept growing.
Artemis charts in the report track USDT supply share by chain around key MiCA milestones.
Lemon, an Argentine crypto and financial services platform, processed $9.3 billion in total volume in 2025, up 60% from the previous year. Transactional users climbed 70% to nearly 1.8 million, and stablecoin volume rose 45% year over year.
Those figures suggest stablecoins are not simply filling a gap created by limited dollar access. They are becoming part of how people move money and spend it.
Ignacio Gimenez, Lemon’s business and planning manager, told Cointelegraph Magazine that stablecoin activity is “increasingly driven by payments, cross-border transfers and global financial services rather than only by savings.”
He said Argentine users can pay in Brazil through PIX using pesos, receive dollars or euros from abroad and have the funds credited as USDC, or move between bank dollars and digital dollar balances.
That makes stablecoin demand harder to judge by looking only at which tokens remain listed on regulated exchanges.
MiCA is changing Europe’s access points
Lemon’s experience shows how user behavior is shifting in one of Latin America’s largest economies, and the article says similar patterns may be starting to appear across emerging markets.
According to Artemis, daily users on Binance Smart Chain increased from about 318,000 in June 2024 to 1.56 million by July 2026. Daily users on Tron rose 44% to around 908,000. Both chains are widely used by everyday stablecoin users because of their lower fees.
That does not make MiCA irrelevant. Weseley said the regulation is changing which stablecoins regulated European platforms can offer and is reshaping the stablecoin market inside the bloc.
Another Artemis chart in the piece shows USDT daily active addresses by chain at different MiCA milestones.
Maksym Sakharov, co-founder and chief executive of crypto financial infrastructure company WeFi, told Cointelegraph Magazine that regulation is mainly changing how users access dollar stablecoins, not removing the underlying demand. That demand still exists across trading, payments and cross-border transfers.
For some firms, the adjustment began well before the latest deadline. Erald Ghoos, chief executive of OKX Europe, said OKX has not offered USDT to European users for around two years, so the latest MiCA deadline did not make much material difference for the platform.
Europe’s substitutes still face the dollar benchmark
A larger question for Europe may be what users adopt instead. Dollar-denominated stablecoins still hold a powerful advantage because the crypto market has long treated the US dollar as its main benchmark.
The report also includes Artemis data comparing USDT transfer volume share by chain before and after MiCA.
Ghoos said he does not expect that global dynamic to change any time soon. At the same time, he said institutional interest in euro-denominated stablecoins is picking up.
For retail users, euro stablecoins could also offer a practical benefit by removing extra friction from transactions, including currency conversion.
Even so, the article argues that while MiCA can decide which products are available through regulated European gateways, it cannot change the dollar’s role in global crypto markets.