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.
CryptoPotato reported back in 2019 the partnership between TRON and Tether – the company behind the largest stablecoin provider.
Launching on TRON came as a diversification for Tether, which was primarily using the Ethereum blockchain at the time (ERC20-based coins).
Two years later, though, the amount of USDT in circulation on ETH is no longer the dominant one. Tether’s transparency webpage reveals that the total authorized USDT on Ethereum is around $23.4 billion.
Simultaneously, the authorized amount of the most widely-used stablecoin on TRON has grown to about $24 billion.
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.
In time, Tether also expanded its stablecoin to other networks. As of now, OMNI is the third-largest with over $1.3 trillion, followed by Solana ($190M), EOS ($70M), Liquid ($16.5M), Algorand ($14M), and SLP ($6M).
Months before the described above flippening, the number of TRC20-based USDT transactions surpassed those based on Ethereum.
Data from the popular monitoring resource CoinMetrics shows the progress of the daily transactions ever since TRC20 USDT launched in 2019.
As the graph above demonstrates, ERC20 USDT dominated for the majority of the next year and a half. However, the situation changed in early 2021. Perhaps fleeing from the high ETH fees, users started employing the TRON blockchain for more and more USDT transactions.
Consequently, the number of TRC20 USDT transactions has far outgrown those on the Ethereum network by now, which are somewhat declining in the past several months.
