🇸🇦 العربية 🇩🇪 Deutsch 🇬🇷 Ελληνικά 🇺🇸 English 🇪🇸 Español 🇫🇮 Suomi 🇫🇷 Français 🇮🇳 हिन्दी 🇮🇹 Italiano 🇯🇵 日本語 🇰🇷 한국어 🇳🇱 Nederlands 🇳🇴 Norsk 🇵🇱 Polski 🇧🇷 Português 🇷🇺 Русский 🇸🇪 Svenska 🇵🇭 Filipino 🇹🇷 Türkçe 🇻🇳 Tiếng Việt 🇨🇳 中文

What Is TrueUSD?

TrueUSD (ticker TUSD) is a US dollar stablecoin that launched in March 2018. It was created by TrustToken, a San Francisco company founded by Rafael Cosman and Danny An, and it was one of the first fiat-backed stablecoins to market itself on legal enforceability and independent third-party attestation of its reserves rather than on the word of its issuer alone. Each TUSD is intended to be redeemable one-for-one for US dollars.

Ownership of TrueUSD changed hands early in its life, and the chain of control matters for understanding everything that followed. In December 2020 TrustToken sold the TrueUSD business to Techteryx, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands and operating out of Asia. TrustToken (which renamed itself Archblock in 2022) continued to run day-to-day TUSD operations under a services agreement for more than two years afterward. Techteryx took full operational control in July 2023. Techteryx is the issuer today; Archblock, TrustToken, and TrueCoin are not.

On September 24, 2024 the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced settled charges against TrueCoin LLC (the original TUSD issuer) and TrustToken Inc. over what it called the fraudulent and unregistered sale of investment contracts involving TUSD and yield opportunities on the TrueFi lending protocol. The SEC alleged that by around March 2022, after TUSD operations had been sold to an offshore entity, more than half a billion dollars of the assets purportedly backing TUSD had been invested in a speculative offshore commodity fund; that by the fall of 2022 the companies were aware of redemption problems at that fund but continued to describe TUSD as backed one-for-one by US dollars; and that by September 2024 roughly 99 percent of TUSD's reserves sat in that fund. Without admitting or denying the allegations, both companies consented to final judgments, and each agreed to pay a civil penalty of 163,766 dollars. TrueCoin additionally agreed to pay 340,930 dollars in disgorgement plus 31,538 dollars in prejudgment interest. The charges were brought against the former issuer and operator, not against Techteryx.

Separately, Techteryx itself has gone to court to recover reserves. In Hong Kong court filings reported by CoinDesk in April 2025, Techteryx alleged that roughly 456 million dollars of TUSD reserves, which it had directed the Hong Kong fiduciary First Digital Trust to place into the Cayman Islands-registered Aria Commodity Finance Fund, instead ended up with Aria Commodities DMCC, a separate Dubai-based trade finance firm, and were locked into illiquid ventures such as mining, manufacturing, and renewable energy projects. Techteryx characterizes this as misappropriation. First Digital Trust denies wrongdoing and says it acted as a custodian executing instructions rather than as a fiduciary. Aria rejects the claims outright: Matthew Brittain, who heads the Aria group, has said he completely rejects Techteryx's allegations against Aria Commodities DMCC and any related entities, that a number of false allegations were made in the proceedings, and that the fund was never presented as a highly liquid strategy suitable for stablecoin reserves. These are allegations and denials; no court has ruled on the merits. On October 17, 2025 the Dubai Digital Economy Court issued a worldwide freezing order over 456 million dollars in assets connected to Aria, with Justice Michael Black KC finding there were "serious issues to be tried". A freezing order is a preservation measure, not a finding of liability.

Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, is the other recurring name in the TUSD story, and it is worth being precise about what is established. Sun has publicly described his role as advisory. What is documented in Techteryx's own Hong Kong court filings, and reported by CoinDesk and others, is that Sun provided emergency funding (structured as a loan) around mid-2023 to backstop TUSD redemptions while the reserves were stuck, and he has publicly said he covered the shortfall for TUSD holders. Techteryx also quarantined 400 million TUSD to keep retail redemptions functioning. In April 2025 Sun publicly claimed First Digital Trust was "effectively insolvent" and urged users to move their assets. First Digital denied this, called it a smear campaign, said it was fully solvent, and pursued a defamation claim against him. Reporting on whether Sun holds a beneficial ownership interest in Techteryx is conflicting, and we do not treat it as established.

TUSD's commercial arc was shaped by Binance. In March 2023, after the New York Department of Financial Services ordered Paxos to wind down BUSD, Binance moved its zero-fee Bitcoin trading promotion from BUSD to TUSD, and from June 30, 2023 it extended zero maker fees to all TUSD spot and margin pairs. TUSD's market cap climbed from under one billion dollars to more than three billion dollars. Then Binance's attention shifted to FDUSD: it introduced zero-fee FDUSD pairs in December 2023 and left TUSD out of its Launchpool programs. TUSD lost its peg in January 2024, trading down to roughly 97 cents on the major venues and as low as about 93 cents on Poloniex, as holders sold hundreds of millions of dollars of the token. Binance delisted several TUSD spot pairs in March 2024 and removed TUSD from cross and isolated margin in July 2024, and Binance.US delisted TUSD on July 30, 2024.

Today TUSD is deployed natively on Ethereum, Tron, BNB Smart Chain, and Avalanche, with bridged versions on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Cronos, and Aurora. The issuer's transparency page states that reserve attestations are performed by the accounting firm Moore Hong Kong and published daily. As of July 2026 TUSD trades at roughly 0.997 dollars with a market capitalization of about 490 million dollars and a circulating supply near 494 million tokens. That is a small fraction of its 2023 peak, and it now sits well outside the top tier of stablecoins. Its all-time high was 1.62 dollars in August 2018 and its all-time low was 0.8835 dollars in March 2020, both symptoms of thin liquidity rather than of the peg design itself.

Getting Started With TrueUSD

TUSD works like any other ERC-20 or TRC-20 stablecoin. Given its history, it is worth reading the issuer's transparency disclosures and understanding the counterparty risk before holding a meaningful balance.

  1. Step 1: Read the TrueUSD transparency page and attestation reports so you understand who issues the token and how the reserves are reported.
  2. Step 2: Set up a wallet on a chain where TUSD is natively issued, such as Ethereum, Tron, BNB Smart Chain, or Avalanche.
  3. Step 3: Buy TUSD on a centralized exchange or swap into it on a decentralized exchange, then withdraw to your own wallet.
  4. Step 4: If you plan to hold size, monitor the peg and the ongoing litigation over the reserves, and keep in mind that most stablecoin activity has moved to larger, more liquid alternatives.

How to Get a TrueUSD Wallet?

There is no dedicated TrueUSD wallet. Any wallet that supports the chain you hold TUSD on will work.

MetaMask

MetaMask holds TUSD as a standard ERC-20 token on Ethereum, and also on BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism after adding those networks.

TronLink

A large share of TUSD supply lives on Tron. TronLink is the standard browser and mobile wallet for TRC-20 tokens and is the usual choice for TUSD on that chain.

Trust Wallet

Trust Wallet is a mobile option that supports TUSD across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Tron in a single app.

Hardware Wallets

A Ledger or Trezor device can be paired with MetaMask to keep TUSD in cold storage. Note that cold storage protects you from theft, not from issuer or reserve risk.

TrueUSD Resources

How to Buy TrueUSD?

TUSD is still listed on a range of exchanges, though liquidity is a fraction of what it was in 2023 and is no longer concentrated on a single venue.

Centralized Exchanges

Binance still runs a TUSD/USDT spot market, though it removed the BTC/TUSD and ETH/TUSD pairs in April 2026. The venues with real TUSD volume today are WhiteBIT, Gate, HTX, and BitMart. TUSD is still nominally listed on KuCoin and Bybit, but volume there is close to nothing, so treat those as dead markets rather than places to trade. Binance.US delisted TUSD in July 2024, so US users have fewer options than they once did. Check current volumes before trading, because thin books are what turned earlier selling pressure into visible depegs.

Decentralized Exchanges

On Ethereum, TUSD trades in stablecoin pools on Curve and on Uniswap. On BNB Smart Chain it trades on PancakeSwap. Fund a wallet on the relevant chain, connect it, and swap. Slippage on larger swaps can be significant given the shallower pools.

Latest TrueUSD News

The story through 2025 and 2026 has been legal rather than commercial. On October 17, 2025 the Dubai Digital Economy Court granted a worldwide freezing order over 456 million dollars of assets tied to Aria Commodities DMCC, its first such order, as Techteryx pursues recovery of the TUSD reserves it says were misdirected. First Digital Trust publicly welcomed the freeze while continuing to reject Techteryx's and Justin Sun's characterization of its own conduct, and its defamation claim against Sun remains outstanding. None of these disputes has produced a ruling on the merits.

On February 6, 2026, Archblock LLC (which uses the TrustToken brand adopted in 2022) together with TrustToken Inc. and TrueCoin LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the District of Delaware, citing unpaid invoices from Techteryx, a stalled tokenization platform, a monthly cash burn far in excess of its remaining assets, and a separate fraud in which it says it was defrauded of around 3 million dollars by a criminal enterprise operating out of Eastern Europe. Those entities created TUSD but have not issued or operated it for years, so the filing does not directly affect the token. The peg has held close to one dollar through all of this, and the transparency page continues to publish daily attestations, but TUSD is a much smaller and much less liquid stablecoin than it was in 2023. Anyone considering it should weigh that history and the unresolved litigation over its reserves.