During the last two months, tether transactions have spiked considerably. More recently, however, USDT transactions on the Tron network have outpaced the number of tether transfers on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite a whole lot more ERC20-based tethers in the wild, the minted stablecoin using the TRC20 standard has seen a much larger transaction count all year long.
Tether (USDT) is a dominant stablecoin and it is used on a great number of exchanges as the token is paired with nearly every digital asset that has a market value. USDT commands the third-largest market capitalization with a $24.9 billion valuation today.
During the last 24 hours market data shows that tether (USDT) has seen $17 billion in global trade volume. In the early days, tether was minted on the Omni Layer network but for the last four years, USDT tokens have migrated to other blockchains.
In 2021, USDT is issued on a myriad of chains including Ethereum, Tron, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Liquid, Solana, and Algorand. A great majority of tethers are minted using Ethereum’s ERC20 standard, and these tokens have seen significant transaction counts in recent years.
However, this year has been a different story as the tether (USDT) transaction count stemming from the Tron network has been outperforming its ERC20 rival. Every single day in 2021, Tron-based tether (USDT) transaction counts (tx count) have been larger.
For instance, data from Coin Metrics shows the last count three days ago, TRC20 tethers saw 247,000 transactions while the ERC20 tethers saw 179,000 that day. Now even though TRC20 tethers have a larger tx count, the aggregated volume of ERC20 USDTs is still 2x more valuable in terms of settlement.
TRC20-based tethers have beat Ethereum-based tether tx counts week after week for the entire year. Of course, cryptocurrency proponents suspect that the migration from Ethereum to Tron as far as accelerated transactions is likely due to rising ETH network fees.
Fees on the Tron network are near non-existent and Coin Metrics data shows the chain processes 3.1 million transactions per day in comparison to BTC’s 254,000+ transactions per day on January 24, 2021.
Ethereum transactions per day are currently over a million every 24 hours but the fees to transact with ether are much higher than the Tron network’s negligible transfer costs.
At the time of publication, the median transaction fee on the Ethereum network according to data from bitinfocharts.com shows fees are currently around $4.80 per transaction. There’s been a number of days in 2021, where ETH transaction fees have jumped above the $5 range.
What do you think about the number of transactions stemming from tether on the Tron network exceeding the tether transactions on Ethereum? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
