Tether: volumes on Tron grow significantly

The volumes of Tether on the Tron blockchain have been rising sharply in recent days.

Tether dollar (USDT) is a stablecoin token that is present on several blockchains. It originally used to run on Bitcoin’s blockchain, thanks to the Omni layer, but then the ERC-20 token was also launched on Ethereum’s blockchain, taking over. 

Today there are still around 1.3 billion USDT in circulation on Omni, while there are 14.7 billion on Ethereum. 

The second blockchain with the most Tether in circulation is now no longer Bitcoin, but Tron, with around 9 billion USDT. 

It is followed by EOS (40 million), Liquid (16.5 million), SLP (6 million) and Algorand (4 million).

Therefore, only about 60% of USDT tokens are on Ethereum, while 36% are on Tron.

The fact is that Tron allows for faster and cheaper transactions than Ethereum, which is why people who need to move USDT for example from one exchange to another are starting to use TRC-20 tokens instead of ERC-20.

Tether volume growth on Tron

This increase can be seen very well in Tronscan’s graph showing the volume of transactions in USDT. 

Up until July last year, there were rarely more than 45,000 transactions per day, and one billion USDT transferred per day, but since August there has been rapid growth, culminating on January 21st with more than 320,000 transactions in one day. The record for USDT transferred in one day was on January 9th, with almost 5 billion tokens sent with 273,000 transactions. 

The CTO of Tether, Paolo Ardoino, said on Twitter: 

“320k daily transfers… that’s impressive. Tether on Tron is on fire”.

As far as the Ethereum blockchain is concerned, the maximum number of daily USDT transactions is 323,000, recorded on June 23rd, 2020, while the highest daily volume occurred on October 26th, 2020 with 15 billion USDT. 

Therefore, January’s records on Tron in some ways come close to last year’s records on Ethereum. 

Indeed, looking at the trend of the two charts over the last six months, we can see a certain regularity in that of Ethereum, always more or less around 250,000 transactions per day, while there is a clear growth in that of Tron, which went from less than 100,000 to about 300,000 transactions per day. 

In other words, not only has the number of USDT transactions on Tron tripled in the last six months, with those on Ethereum remaining essentially stationary, but in the last few days they have even exceeded it.