The world’s leading stablecoin issuer, Tether, has minted a fresh one billion USDT tokens on the TRON network.
According to the whale alert tracker of big transactions, one billion Tether tokens were minted and sent to the TRON network on Aug 9.
Tether CTO, Paolo Ardoino, who denied a halt in issuance earlier this month was quick to clarify the move:
“1B USDt inventory replenish on TRON Network. Note this is a authorized but not issued transaction, meaning that this amount will be used as inventory for next period issuance requests and chain swaps.”
According to the Tether transparency report, there are now 32 billion USDT issued on the TRON network making it the largest for the stablecoin. It has a further 1.1 billion authorized but not issued yet which is likely to be this recent transaction.
TRON now carries 53.5% of the total 62.8 billion USDT in circulation.
The stablecoin breakdown
Ethereum has around 49% of the total with 30.9 billion USDT as ERC-20 tokens on the network. The remaining handful of USDT is spread thinly over EOS, Algorand, Liquid, SLP (Bitcoin Cash), and Solana. In May, it announced a launch on the Avalanche blockchain.
Tether’s circulating supply has increased by 200% so far this year from 20.9 billion USDT on Jan 1. While that sounds impressive, it has been beaten by all three major rivals.
The largest increase in stablecoin issuance has been from Circle with USDC supply surging by just over 600% so far this year. From a supply of 3.9 billion stablecoins on Jan 1, the USDC supply has surged to an all-time high of 27.6 billion today.
Binance’s own stablecoin, BUSD, has also outperformed Tether in terms of supply growth. It has increased by a whopping 1,130% from a little under one billion tokens to 12.3 billion at the time of press.
The fourth-largest stablecoin and the only fully decentralized one, DAI, has seen a growth of around 380% so far this year. On the first day of 2021, the DAI supply was 1.1 billion and today it’s ballooned to a record 5.5 billion.
When Tether audit?
Tether’s market share decrease has been largely due to fears over its ongoing legal battles. High gas fees on Ethereum are likely to have also made an impact.
In late July, the firm’s general counsel Stuart Hoegner promised that an audit would be coming “in months, not years” when speaking to CNBC. Tether’s reserves are heavily dollar-weighted but also include cash equivalents, bonds, secured loans, crypto assets, and other investments according to Hoegner.
There has been increased concern over the backing of the stablecoin this year as its circulating supply has ballooned.
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