What TrueUSD does
TrueUSD is a fiat-collateralised stablecoin launched in 2018, marketed at the time as one of the first stablecoins to offer regular attestations of its US dollar reserves, aiming to differentiate itself from Tether's long history of opacity. It's designed to trade 1:1 with the US dollar, redeemable through partner trust companies rather than being minted algorithmically.
For years TUSD built a reputation as a comparatively conservative, well-collateralised stablecoin, and it saw significant adoption on Binance and TRON, at times ranking among the larger stablecoins by market cap thanks to zero-fee trading pairs and TRON's low transaction costs. Ownership and operational control of TrueUSD has shifted over time, and by the early 2020s a firm called Techteryx held the TrueUSD brand, with reserve custody arrangements that became the source of serious trouble.
Risks worth knowing
In mid-2023, TrueUSD's peg broke, dropping as low as roughly $0.97, after reports emerged that a large chunk of its reserves had been moved offshore and tied up with an entity linked to Justin Sun's business network, with redemption delays and murky custody arrangements at the centre of the story. First Digital Trust, TUSD's Hong Kong-based custodian, later became embroiled in its own dispute over reserve management, and TUSD's market cap and trading volumes shrank sharply as major exchanges and market makers pulled back.
TrueUSD's core problem isn't a technical one — it's trust. A stablecoin's entire value proposition rests on reserves genuinely being where issuers say they are and redeemable on demand, and TUSD's 2023 depeg and subsequent custody disputes damaged that proposition badly. Anyone holding TUSD today is taking on real counterparty and reserve-transparency risk that better-audited peers like USDC have mostly managed to avoid, and the coin's shrunken liquidity means exiting a large position isn't always smooth.