Tether dollars (USDT) issued on the Tron blockchain could soon be more than those issued on Ethereum.
In fact, USDT tokens exist on several different blockchains. Initially, they only existed on the Bitcoin blockchain, thanks to the Omni protocol, but then they landed on Ethereum, and later on Tron, EOS, Liquid, Algorand, SLP and Solana.
In total, there are now almost 46 billion USDT in circulation, 50% of which are on the Ethereum blockchain.
Since they were also issued on Ethereum, these have taken over, and there are now only less than 3% on Omni.
However, for some time now Ethereum has suffered from a problem that makes USDT less usable, namely high transaction fees and slow execution times.
It now takes at least $10 of gas to be able to have a good guarantee that a transaction on Ethereum will be validated quickly, and this certainly hurts smaller transactions in particular.
Transactions on Tron, on the other hand, have much lower commission costs and better execution speed. Ever since Tether issued USDT on Tron, these have often been preferred to those on Ethereum.
Tether, 22 billion USDT on Tron
To date, the company has issued nearly 22 billion USDT on the Tron blockchain, which is more than 46% of all USDT issued.
Therefore, the majority of new USDT tokens issued by Tether are now issued on the Tron blockchain, such that it may not be long before these surpass those issued on Ethereum in number.
📢According to @coinmetrics, the market cap of #TRC20–#USDT is about to surpass #ERC20–#USDT! Prepare to witness history!
🤗Use #TRC20–#USDT to enjoy immediate transactions, free handling fee, different use cases such as trading, #TRON #Dapp, #BitTorrent, and more. pic.twitter.com/F37pmTW5Y4
— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) April 13, 2021
In fact, even comparing the numbers for total daily transactions recorded on the two blockchains, Tron has been outperforming Ethereum for some time now, probably due to the lower cost of gas.
Moreover, Tron‘s native cryptocurrency TRX also seems to be benefiting from this usage, as its price has risen more than ETH‘s in the last week.
However, TRX has not yet reached its all-time high of $0.3 from January 2018, while ETH has already far surpassed the peaks it touched in that same month.