USDT issuer Tether has minted $1 billion worth of its stablecoin on the Tron network. According to data from blockchain analytics service Arkham Intelligence, Tether paid no fees for the transaction.
Arkham’s on-chain records show that after Tether sent the $1 billion to its multi-signature wallet, the funds were transferred to its Treasury, also without any transaction fees. The transaction was performed from a Tron “black hole address” to the company’s multi-sig wallet beginning with “TBPxh”
According to CoinGecko data, USDT is the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and easily the largest stablecoin. Data shows that with a market cap of more than $127 billion, USDT accounts for more than 78% of the total market cap of stablecoins. This popularity is largely driven by the asset’s adoption and widespread use in several sectors, including entertainment. On popular Canadian betting sites where cryptocurrencies are an accepted mode of payment, USDT is used along with other assets in addition to fiat. Canadian gamblers on these sites enjoy great bonuses, fast transactions, and access to sports betting tournaments with the potential for impressive wins.
Tether’s transparency page shows that USDT is available on several different blockchains. While the volume on the Ethereum blockchain is the largest, at $62.9 billion, Tron comes in a close second, at $62.7 billion. Despite Ethereum’s popularity and reputation as one of the most popular and versatile blockchain networks, Tron’s high scalability and cheap transaction fees have made the network a worthy Ethereum competitor.
Tron is also enjoying increased decentralized finance (DeFi) activity. As part of efforts to make further inroads into DeFi, Tron announced its decision to use Chainlink as its oracle solution provider. An official press release revealed that TRON DAO will discontinue support for WINkLink as the platform’s oracle solution provider, highlighting the fact that JustStable and JustLend, the two largest DeFi applications on the platform, with more than $6.5 billion in total value locked (TVL), will use Chainlink Data Feeds.
In recent times, Tron has enjoyed increased activity via memecoins on its platform. For instance, data from Messari shows that nearly 30% of Tron’s quarterly revenue, a $151.2 million record high in Q3, came from the platform’s launchpad, SunPump. Between August 12 and September 30, SunPump successfully launched more than 89,000 tokens.
In an interesting twist, TRON DAO recently partnered with Tether to freeze USDT tokens as part of a fight against crime. In a September post on X, TRON DAO announced that its T3 Financial Crime Unit had frozen more than $12 million in USDT on TRON. According to the post, the frozen funds are tied to illegal activities.
About a week before the post, TRON DAO launched the financial crime task force in collaboration with Tether and TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence platform that provides services to law enforcement, financial institutions, and crypto service providers.
The creation and launch of this task force was considered necessary because of illegal activities powered by USDT on TRON. According to a January report from the United Nations, TRON is the preferred network for criminals and fraudsters committing crimes using USDT. TRON founder Justin Sun refuted the claim, arguing that Tron is simply the preferred USDT network for all users.
