Tether’s USDT Is Being Used More on Tron than Ethereum For the Last Three Weeks Straight

Tron blockchain is seeing a lot of activity when it comes to the number of Tether (USDT) transactions. This count has surpassed even that of Ethereum for more than three weeks in a row.

Weekly Tether transactions on Ethereum have been keeping above 1.5 million, and daily transactions are primarily above 200k for the past month.

On the Tron network, USDT transactions per week have grown from about 900k in mid-December to almost 2 million. The daily transaction count on Tron was about 119k in the first week of December, which has now climbed to 310k.

Tx Count of USDT-ETH and USDT-TRX, Source: Coin Metrics

Tether is the dominant stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market, accounting for 70% of the stablecoin market share. Unlike the transaction count, the number of USDT issued on the Ethereum blockchain has a 58.8% share while Tron only has 37.6% share.

Out of the total market cap of nearly $25 billion, over $14.7 bln are issued on Ethereum, while nearly $9.4 bln are on the Tron blockchain.

This further makes the trend of more activity on Tron glaring because of the crazy high fees on Ethereum. Average transaction fees on Ethereum, currently around $7, climbed to another peak on Jan. 11 at $19.

As Ethereum becomes too costly to use for smaller users, transactions shift from the second-largest network to Tron. But Tron is not the only available option as Tether is also issued on EOS, Liquid, Algorand, Solana, and SLP.

However, Tron is working on attracting more and more asset bases as CEO Justin Sun said on The Wolf Of All Streets Podcast, “We want to serve all the stablecoin issuers and to provide the best infrastructure support for them.”

During the interview, Sun talked about Ethereum having a very big scalability problem while the Tron network can handle over 50 million transactions per day.

But still, Tron is the 20th largest crypto asset while ETH is at the top, which according to Sun, is because it “takes lots of time for Tron to grow its asset base in the first place.”

Sun is planning to release more regulated stablecoins on Tron. They have already brought Bitcoin on its blockchain, currently at $600 mln, which the founder expects to grow to $6 bln this year.

After we grow our asset base with Bitcoin, Ethereum, different kinds of stablecoin, and different kinds of assets on the Tron platform, “you will start to see the network effects and the Tron ecosystem gonna really explode just like Ethereum,” said Sun.