Tether, the company behind the popular United States dollar-backed stablecoin, USDT has announced that it will be moving a significant portion of USDTs on TRON to the Ethereum blockchain. The TRON blockchain is one of the biggest Ethereum rivals. The latest update from Tether wasn’t all welcomed by the TRON community, as they cited the high fees for making transactions on the latter blockchain.
One billion USDTs on TRON will be swapped to ERC-20
As Tether tweeted on Monday, one billion USDTs on TRON will be swapped to Ethereum (ERC20 protocol) on September 15. The company will coordinate with a 3rd party to enable a two-chain swap conversion of the stablecoin. Although the swapping of the USDTs to Ethereum will raise the number of the stablecoins issued on the blockchain, the total supply of USDT remains the same.
Tether’s tweet reads:
“Tomorrow Tether will coordinate with a 3rd party to perform two chain swaps (conversion from Tron to ERC20 protocol) for 1B USDt.
Tether total supply will not change during this process.”
Tether’s stablecoin has a total supply of 15,083,309,835 USDT, of which 14,709,331,641 USDTs are currently in circulation, according to Coinmarketcap. USDT is the largest and the most traded stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market. With about $14.7 billion market capitalization, the stablecoin now sits as the third-largest cryptocurrency, overthrowing Ripple (XRP) again, which is now ranked fourth.
TRON vs Ethereum
Ethereum and TRON are two other blockchains holding a significant percentage of the Tether stablecoin. According to Tronscan, there are currently about 4.75 billion USDTs on TRON, all of which are currently in circulation. However, Ethereum houses a bigger share of the stablecoins, as about 8.8 billion USDTs have been issued on the blockchain.
After the USDTs on TRON blockchain is swapped to Ethereum, TRON, perhaps, will lose more of the stablecoin. Following TRON’s rivalry for the other blockchain network, the community is not pleased with the announcement. Particularly, they cited that it will now be more costly to transact with those USDTs on Ethereum than TRON.
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