First Digital USD

When Binance wound down its BUSD stablecoin, much of that liquidity flowed into FDUSD, which quickly became one of the exchange's dominant trading dollars. It is issued by FD121, a British Virgin Islands company, with reserves held in US Treasury bills by the affiliated custodian First Digital Trust in Hong Kong. The redemption right is not retail: only approved institutions can redeem directly at par, and US persons are excluded, so ordinary holders rely on the secondary market. That structure was stress-tested in April 2025, when Tron founder Justin Sun publicly alleged the custodian was insolvent and FDUSD briefly slid to around 0.87 dollars. First Digital denied the claim, kept honouring redemptions, and the peg recovered within days. The episode underlined how thin the line is between a rumour and a run for a token that trades on trust rather than a bank charter.