stUSDT shuts down: interest stopped on 14 November, and holders have until 14 May 2027 to redeem

stUSDT, a token on Tron and Ethereum that once held about $2.3 billion and promised holders the yield of short-term US government debt, is shutting down. In a notice on its Medium page published at 06:36 UTC on 14 November, the stUSDT team said interest payments ended that day and opened a redemption window that runs until 14 May 2027 at 23:59 UTC. Holders have to unstake their tokens and claim USDT themselves on the official portal; nothing is paid out automatically.

The notice says “all underlying assets remain fully backed”. It gives no figure, no custodian, no audit and no reason for the wind-down. DefiLlama data show the staking or liquidity, measured at current market prices. It is the main size metric in DeFi.">value locked in the stUSDT contracts falling from about $47.5 million on 13 November to about $9.5 million on 14 November, and to about $8.4 million at 10:38 UTC on Sunday 15 November.

Anyone holding stUSDT or its wrapped version, wstUSDT, through a lending app or an exchange has an extra step. JustLend, the Tron lending protocol that runs a market where wstUSDT can be supplied and borrowed, announced on 14 November that it will switch off new deposits and loans in that market and later change its parameters, without giving dates.

Interest stopped on 14 November, and the redemption portal closes on 14 May 2027

stUSDT was a rebasing token: instead of paying interest in a separate coin, it raised the number of tokens in each holder’s wallet as yield accrued. That rebasing is what ended on 14 November. From that day, according to the notice, stUSDT “no longer generates rewards”, so a balance that is left untouched now earns nothing.

The same day, the redemption period began on the stusdt.io website. The notice also warns that exchanges, wallets and DeFi protocols “will begin gradually discontinuing support” for stUSDT and wstUSDT. It does not name which ones or when, so a venue that lists the token today may stop doing so well before May. Holders whose tokens sit in a blockchain that runs exactly as written when it is called, holding and moving funds according to its code, without an intermediary able to change the outcome.">smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">liquidity pool or another third-party protocol are told to follow that platform’s own instructions to withdraw them.

After the web portal shuts on 14 May 2027, requests move to customer support on the team’s Telegram channel and are “processed in monthly batches through August 2027”, the notice says. It says nothing about tokens that are still unclaimed after August 2027.

Two points that holders will want settled are not in the text: whether any fee or minimum amount applies, and the exact rate at which a rebased stUSDT balance converts into USDT. The steps describe unstaking an amount and claiming USDT, which suggests one USDT per stUSDT, but the notice does not state a rate.

What stUSDT holders must do, step by step, and by when

The sequence below follows the official notice. Order matters: tokens held on a third-party platform cannot be redeemed until they sit in a wallet you control.

1. Now, before support disappears: if your stUSDT or wstUSDT is on an exchange, in a custodial wallet or deposited in a DeFi protocol (the notice names JustLend, SunSwap and Curve), withdraw it to a personal wallet first. In a lending market that may mean repaying a loan before the collateral can be released.
2. Keep a little gas in that wallet: TRX for tokens on Tron, ETH for tokens on Ethereum. Without it the unstake and claim transactions cannot be sent.
3. Open the portal at stusdt.io/#/home, the only address the notice gives. Type it in yourself rather than following a link from a message or a search advert.
4. Connect a Web3 wallet (the notice lists TronLink, MetaMask and OKX Wallet), go to the Stake page, choose Unstake, pick the network and enter the amount.
5. Confirm the transaction in your wallet, then click Claim to receive USDT. Unstaking and claiming are two separate actions; the first one alone does not pay you.
6. If you hold wstUSDT, open the portal’s Wrap page, choose Unwrap to convert it into stUSDT, enter the amount and confirm in your wallet. Once the stUSDT has arrived, follow steps 4 and 5.
7. Finish before 14 May 2027, 23:59 UTC. After that date, requests go to the team’s Customer Support, whose official channel is on Telegram, and are processed in monthly batches through August 2027.

The stUSDT team also flags the scam risk that comes with every wind-down of this kind. It says it will never contact holders first by direct message, ask for a private key or recovery phrase, ask them to transfer assets to another wallet or ask for a payment to unlock or verify their assets. Anyone unsure about a message or a website is told to contact the official support before doing anything. Anyone who receives such a request is dealing with an impostor; our guide to spotting crypto scams lists the usual patterns, and a seed phrase should never be typed into any website.

Tokens in JustLend, SunSwap or Curve

JustLend’s announcement describes two phases for its SBM-wstUSDT market. In Phase I, supplying and borrowing wstUSDT “will be disabled soon”; no date is given. No new positions can be opened, and existing ones stay supported during the transition.

Phase II will adjust the market’s parameters “to facilitate the final wind-down”, with details promised in later announcements. JustLend asks suppliers to withdraw and close their positions, borrowers to repay, and everyone with a position in the market to monitor their account health. JustLend has not said which parameters will change. If they include the collateral settings, a leveraged position that looks safe today could move closer to liquidation.

The stUSDT notice names SunSwap and Curve without separate dates for them. On both, the practical step is the same: remove the liquidity or withdraw the tokens to a personal wallet, then redeem on the portal.

DefiLlama shows about $38 million leaving in a single day

The DefiLlama page for stUSDT tracks the dollar value of tokens staked in the protocol’s contracts. That is a proxy for supply, not a count of the reserves behind it. The daily snapshots around the announcement look like this:

Two moves stand out. The first came on 8 November, six days before the notice, when about $8.6 million left the Tron contract. The second is far larger: about $36 million left on Tron, and almost all of the $1.8 million on Ethereum, between the snapshots of 00:00 UTC on 13 and 14 November. The Medium post is timestamped 06:36 UTC on 14 November, so most of that money had already moved by the time it went up. Whether some holders heard of the wind-down earlier, through another channel, is not public.

The data do not show who moved the tokens, or whether every one of them was redeemed for USDT. A fall in staked value can also mean that large holders unstaked and moved their stUSDT elsewhere. What the figures do show is that most of the money still in the protocol left in the 24 hours before the Medium post. Cointelegraph, which reported the wind-down on 15 November, cites the same $8.6 million and says stUSDT did not answer its request for comment.

From $2.3 billion to $8.4 million: three years of stUSDT

DefiLlama lists stUSDT from 4 July 2023, when it held about $22 million on Tron. It was sold as a way to earn the return of short-term US Treasury bills on a token pegged to the dollar, the kind of product grouped under real world assets. Growth was fast: about $1.71 billion on Tron by 29 September 2023, then a Tron peak of $2.228 billion on 22 November 2023. With the Ethereum contract, which peaked at $72.97 million on 4 November 2023, the total came to about $2.3 billion.

The concentration of that money drew attention early. On 3 August 2023, Cryptoast, relaying on-chain work by Protos, reported that the exchange Huobi (since renamed HTX) held about 85% of the supply, with 92% of the Tron tokens on one Huobi address and 7% on an address believed to belong to Justin Sun, described in the article as an adviser to the exchange and a part-owner of it. On Ethereum, 72% sat on one address that Etherscan tagged to Sun. These were attributions of holdings by third parties: no public document names the company or people who run stUSDT, and the Cointelegraph report refers only to “the stUSDT team”.

The project’s website listed Tether among its partners at the time. Tether denied any affiliation in September 2023, Cointelegraph recalls. USDT’s own issuer publishes quarterly reserve reports, the latest covered in our piece on Tether’s Q3 attestation; stUSDT has nothing comparable.

Then the money left. Tron value fell to $1.25 billion on 21 March 2024, $486 million on 16 June, $222 million on 11 September and $59.8 million on 8 December 2024. On Ethereum, Protos reported on 24 October 2024 that the exchange Poloniex had pulled out, leaving one holder with about $1.7 million, roughly 90% of what remained. The same report put an HTX address at about $195 million, around 85% of Tron supply at that time. From early 2025 the Tron figure barely moved, staying between about $53 million and $63 million until the first days of November 2026.

For readers comparing products, our explainer on yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenised treasuries sets out what a holder can usually check: who issues the token, where the bonds are held and who attests to them.

What is still unknown: reserves, operator and audit

The backing claim rests on the team’s word. DefiLlama shows no audit for the protocol, and no public reserve attestation, custodian name or breakdown of the underlying assets appears in the notice or on the DefiLlama listing. “Fully backed” may be accurate; it cannot be checked from what is public.

Several basic facts are missing:

• The legal entity and the people who operate stUSDT are not named in the notice or in the press reports on the wind-down.
• The reason for closing the protocol is not given.
• Fees, minimum amounts and the conversion rate from stUSDT to USDT are not stated.
• It is not known who holds the remaining $8.4 million, or how concentrated that balance is now.
• The roughly $38 million that left between 13 and 14 November may or may not have been paid out as USDT.
• JustLend has not dated Phase I or published the Phase II parameters.

For holders, the risks until May follow from those gaps. The token earns nothing now. Liquidity on third-party venues may vanish as support is dropped. Changes to JustLend’s settings could hit leveraged wstUSDT positions. After 14 May, redemption depends on a support desk whose only listed channel is Telegram. The team itself warns that fraudulent websites and impersonators may target holders during the redemption period.

For readers in France and Italy the procedure is the same as everywhere else: a personal wallet, the official address and the May deadline. Holders who later sell the USDT they receive for euros should check how that sale is treated for tax purposes in their country.

What to watch next

The next dates are JustLend’s: the switch-off of wstUSDT supply and borrowing in Phase I, then the Phase II parameter changes, both still undated. Exchange and wallet notices on dropping stUSDT and wstUSDT should follow. The DefiLlama figure will show how much of the last $8.4 million is redeemed. The portal deadline is 14 May 2027 at 23:59 UTC, and support batches end in August 2027.