Roughly two years after adding Tether (USDT) to its blockchain, TRON has reached a significant milestone by outplacing Ethereum as the network with the highest amount of USDT on it. As of now, over half of all the Tether in circulation is on Justin Sun’s brainchild.
There’s now more of the dollar-linked stable coin tether on the Tron blockchain than on Ethereum, data from Coin Metrics shows, possibly a sign that crypto traders are favoring the network’s lower transaction fees.
In other words, the TRON blockchain carries the most significant amount of USDT. With less than $47 billion in USDT (as famously one USDT is supposed to be backed by $1), it means that TRC20-based USDT is responsible for more than half of the entire circulation.
Somewhat expectedly, TRON’s founder Justin Sun was quick to highlight the “historic moment” on its Twitter profile.
As of April 14, the total market capitalization of tether (USDT) on Tron was $24 billion, versus $23.4 billion on Ethereum.
“As the popularity and adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain continue to grow, we expect USDT to continue to explode in popularity” Justin Sun, founder of Tron and CEO of BitTorrent, said in a press release. “By crossing this historic milestone, I can proudly say that Tron is well positioned to become the global settlement layer and the blockchain protocol of the future.”
The growth of the tether on Tron came as transaction fees on Ethereum remain high, frustrating many crypto traders who frequently use the stable coin during trading to exit quickly from short-term trades and lock in gains with an asset at a stabilized value.
As CoinDesk reported previously, the number of tether transactions on the Tron blockchain has also passed those on Ethereum.
According to data from CoinGecko, the tether is the most traded cryptocurrency in the world, exceeding bitcoin, ether and meme crypto dogecoin.
USDT’s launch as a TRC-20 token was announced in 2019 in an effort to allow users to more easily conduct transactions within decentralized finance (DeFi).