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The number of USDT transactions on the Ethereum network is increasing steadily. However, the network is close to reaching its maximum capacity, and as Tether continues to print more tokens, there’s less and less room for developers of decentralized applications (DApps). This brings up the scalability issues of Ethereum and makes finding a solution even more urgent.
USDT ERC-20 Transactions Utilize 25% of Ethereum’s Network
Data from Etherscan indicates that on September 6, the Ethereum network processed a total of 768,500 transactions.
On the same day, there were 185,255 USDT ERC-20 transactions carried out on the network. This is almost 25% of all the transactions for that day.
Now, according to Tether’s transparency page, there’s around $1.5 billion worth of USDT circulating on the Ethereum network. This represents about 40% of Tether’s entire circulating supply.
As seen on the chart above, the USDT daily transaction count actually reached an all-time high on September 6, and the trend seems to have continued as the count has been going up over the past couple of weeks.
Is it Becoming a Problem?
Data shows that the Ethereum network is currently operating at 94.74% capacity. In other words, there’s almost no room left.
Evidently, one of the network’s major consumers is Tether and its stablecoin USDT. As the company continues to print more and more of it, the amount which circulates on Ethereum’s network is probably going to grow as well.
The more this continues, the less available space there will be for developers of decentralized apps. Given that this is Ethereum’s main purpose, one can easily see how this is becoming a problem.
As CryptoPotato reported, there are a couple of solutions already in the making, namely Sharding and Plasma, but it remains unclear when we can expect their actual implementation.
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