Tether Moves 1 Billion USDT to Ethereum Amid Sky-High Fees and Congestion

Ethereum’s network is on the brink of its highest congestion rate, while the transaction fees are still particularly high.

Amid all of this, Tether has moved over 1 billion USDT from Tron’s network to Ethereum.

Tether Moving 1 Billion USDT to Ethereum

Earlier today, Tether, the company issuing the most popular stablecoin, USDT, announced that it plans to move 1 billion USDT to Ethereum’s ERC20 protocol.

“In a few hours, Tether will coordinate with a 3rd party to perform two chain swaps (conversion from Tron to ERC20 protocol) for 1B USDT. Tether total supply will not change during the process.”

About an hour ago, the company’s CTO, Paolo Ardoino, confirmed that the transactions have taken place and that the swap is completed.

This is completed now!https://t.co/HSJQ3ehHhn https://t.co/bybswQBMC0

— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) August 20, 2020

It ”s important to note that Tether didn’t mint new tokens but just swapped ones that were already in circulation.

According to Tether’s Transparency page, the total assets are currently just shy of $13 billion, of which $7.5 billion are circulating on Ethereum’s network. The second-largest amount of about $4.3 billion is based on Tron.

This might bring some further concerns about Ethereum’s current network stage.

Ethereum Congested as it Is

The network is at the forefront of the ongoing DeFi boom. According to DeFi Pulse, there’s around $6.65 billion locked in protocols, and the majority of these are based on Ethereum’s network.

This causes serious network congestion and sky-high transaction fees.

Data from Etherscan reveals that, at the time of this writing, the network’s congestion stands at almost 97%.

On the other hand, the median transaction fee stands at $1.872. This is a considerable drop from the highs from a few days ago, but it’s still just as high as it was back in 2018 amid the peak of the ICO boom.

It’s becoming evident that the forthcoming update of Ethereum 2.0 is paramount for the future of the network and the protocols that are built around it.