The Fee That Never Was: USDT's Ghost Mechanism Runs in Every Block
· 4 min read
Buried in the USDT contract source code is a comment that reads: "additional variables for use if transaction fees ever became necessary." Beneath it: basisPointsRate = 0 and maximumFee = 0. Both initialized to zero. Never changed. The fee mechanism was coded in 2017 in case Tether ever wanted to charge for transfers. They never did.
But the code that reads those variables runs on every USDT transfer. And USDT transfers happen in virtually every Ethereum block.