USDC vs USDT:
which one to pay contractors in

Tether's transparency page, updated at 23:30 UTC on 22 October 2026, puts USDT in circulation at $182.6 billion, of which $92.7 billion is on TRON and $85.5 billion on Ethereum. A contractor in a market where people are paid on TRON will usually ask for USDT there, and their exchange will take it.

Circle's transparency page puts USDC in circulation at $71.9 billion against $72.2 billion of reserves as of 19 October 2026, discloses reserve holdings weekly, and has a Big Four firm provide monthly assurance that reserves exceed circulation.

Most of the reserve sits in the Circle Reserve Fund, an SEC-registered government money market fund. In July 2024 Circle said USDC can be issued in the EU under MiCA through its French e-money institution.

If your accountant or auditor will ask what backs the coin, Circle's weekly holdings and monthly assurance report are the documents to hand over; for USDT it is Tether's latest reserves report.

A team that pays some contractors in USDT on TRON and others in USDC on Solana keeps a little TRX and a little SOL on two wallets and two sets of addresses. That is fine when it is a decision, and expensive when it is an accident. Pick one per contractor, write the network into the agreement, and keep one fallback.

Etherscan's gas tracker at 01:09 UTC on 23 October 2026 showed gas at 0.044 gwei, a USDT transfer at $0.006 (54,128 gas) and its estimate for an ERC-20 token transfer, the kind a USDC transfer is, at $0.007 (65,000 gas). Gas moves with congestion, so that is one night's figure, not a promise.

Base, Arbitrum and Polygon share the same 0x address, keep separate balances and have their own gas.

A USDT transfer spends energy. The latest confirmed USDT transfers on TRON at 01:10 UTC used 64,285 energy when the recipient already held USDT and 130,285 when it held none.

The network's own parameter prices energy at 100 sun a unit, so a wallet without staked energy burns about 6.4 TRX or 13 TRX a transfer, roughly $2.11 or $4.28 at a TRX price of $0.328 that hour. Paying a new address costs about twice as much as paying one that has been paid before.

The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, paid in SOL, with an optional priority fee on top. A recipient who has never held the token needs a token account opened, about 0.002 SOL once, and a wallet that holds only USDC cannot move it until it holds a little SOL.

The contractor pays to turn tokens into their currency: an exchange's trading fee, a withdrawal and their bank. That is usually the largest cost on the whole route, and it depends on which coin and network their exchange supports cheaply. Ask them before you choose.

There is no chargeback and no bank to phone. What can be done happens before the send.

Circle's USDC terms, updated 15 October 2026, say it may be required to freeze USDC on a legal order from a valid government authority, and Tether's terms let it freeze tokens and blacklist addresses. Rare for a payroll, and real: the address you pay matters.

USDT on TRON and USDT on Ethereum are different tokens on different chains. Money sent to an address on the wrong chain, or to a network the contractor's exchange does not credit, can be lost.

Address poisoning copies the first and last characters of an address you know. Copying from your transaction history instead of from the contractor's own message is how it works.

A contractor's card keeps a wallet address per network with one marked default. The account you pay from decides which of them can be used at all: a TRON wallet offers TRON addresses, an Ethereum wallet the EVM ones, so the wrong network is not a choice the form offers.

A batch draws from one wallet and pays in its coin or a token it holds, up to 200 rows, from a CSV if you like. Payments above a threshold need the signatures the rule asks for, and whoever proposed a payment cannot sign it.

A recipient that looks like a contact but differs in the middle is held, with the contact it resembles named under the row.

Where address screening is on, the run offers to screen every address with no check from the last month, one paid check each; the verdict reads Low risk, High risk or Blacklisted, and a high-risk address is held back until someone releases that payee.

Not enough TRX for energy is told apart from not enough USDT, and the preview on Solana shows the token account a new recipient needs.

Each payment shows its transaction id and what the network actually charged; the fee is its own row in SOL, TRX or ETH. The month leaves as journal lines for Xero or QuickBooks with the value in your base currency at that day's rate.