Ethereum USDT Double

The number of ethereum based USDT tokens has doubled in about a month from $600 million in June to now $1.2 billion ERC20 Tethers.

As can be seen above, USDT has increased by $1 billion to above $3.6 billion from the previous all time high of $2.8 billion in October.

It has further increased by two billion since the recent low of $1.6 billion in mid-November with it suggesting new funds are entering crypto.

Interestingly there appears to be a move away from the bitcoin based Omni USDT to the ethereum ERC20 USDT. Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex, said:

“We are getting more and more requests to swap Tether from Omni to ERC20. That’s why these Tether got minted.

As you can see [Omni] is growing since it is receiving Tether-Omni leg. Once the swap flow will be stable we’ll burn the excess.”

Binance recently stated they are to accept only ERC20 USDT without any reason given for this decision with Tether itself apparently moving much of its operations to ethereum.

That $2.8 billion on omni has not changed since last month, but the eth teth are up and up to now $1.2 billion.

Interestingly they have a euro stable coin which appears to be running almost exclusively on eth.

That could be relevant if Trump does pressure for dollar devaluation as USDT holders might decide to sit on tokenized euros instead.

As an ERC20 token, USDT can potentially easily be integrated with the entire ethereum ecosystem especially in the increasingly popular open finance space where you can lend and borrow on collateralized algorithms.

It would in some ways compete with the eth native DAI, but the latter has to move somewhat slowly due to complex methods of digitally keeping its peg.

DAI thus lacks much liquidity, while USDT is integrated in exchanges across the world, used primarily for arbitrage, to bypass restrictions and to bypass the banking system.

As it can be integrated in any smart contract, there could be potential innovation to algorithmically arbitrage somewhat automatically with the main strength of the ethereum blockchain in this case being decentralized exchanges (dex).

In light of India potentially outright banning bitcoin and other cryptos, code based exchanges that automatically run on an unstoppable network might be the only somewhat convenient way of accessing crypto in the country.

The process here would start Over the Counter (OTC) by buying ERC20 USDT that can then easily be exchanged on dexes for any crypto, including bitcoin which has been tokenized.

Making tether’s move to ethereum somewhat inevitable with now pretty much all stable coins running on eth.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com