Tether Moves 8% of Total USDT from Tron to Ethereum

Paul de Havilland

Aug. 20, 2020

Tether to move one billion dollars worth of USDT from TRON to Ethereum despite congestion concerns.

Key Takeaways

Tether will move 1 billion USDT coins from the TRON network to Ethereum.
The tokens represent around 8% of the total market cap of USDT.
Tether has also launched on the OMG network.

The controversial stablecoin issuer, Tether, is set to move 1 billion USDT tokens from the TRON network to the Ethereum network, representing eight percent of the total supply of USDT on the market.

Tether to Move 1 Billion Coins to Ethereum

The amount of Tether tokens on the Ethereum blockchain will increase from 7.5 to 8.5 billion, while the supply on the TRON network will drop to 3.3 billion.

According to reporting, an unnamed exchange had requested the maneuver. Paolo Ardoino, the CTO of Bitfinex and Tether, told Crypto Briefing:

“A cryptocurrency exchange is willing to swap part of its Tethers from TRC20 to ERC20.”

The swap is curious given the rationale for enabling USDT transactions on the OMG network. Tether Limited said in a statement that the “integration will result in a reduction of confirmation times delivering faster payments” and that the Ethereum network is “vulnerable to severe network congestion.”

The company first launched its TRC20 tokens on the TRON network in March 2019.

Move Follows USDT’s OMG Launch

The fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap is now available on seven blockchains. On the latest OMG Network launch, CTO Paolo Ardoino remarked:

“At Tether we are committed to driving innovation and improvements to our service to better support our customers. By migrating USDT value transfers to the OMG Network we save costs, drive performance improvements and relieve pressure on the root chain network. This is good for Bitfinex and our customers, and the whole Ethereum ecosystem.”

With over $10 billion worth of total supply, according to CoinMarketCap, Tether, which was first released on the Omni (Bitcoin) and Ethereum networks, now also trades on TRON, EOS, Liquid Network, Algorand, and, as of yesterday, OMG.

Since its launch in 2014, Tether has dominated the stablecoin space. Its supply has risen dramatically this year in response to surging demand.

At the end of March, it had a market cap under $5 billion. That figure has since doubled.

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