ERC-20 Tether now accounts for 40% of all ERC-20 transfers

Over the last month, ERC-20 Tether transactions have skyrocketed to an all-time high, and have, over the last week, accounted for just over 40% of ALL ERC-20 transfers:

In absolute numbers, out of the average of 430,000 daily transfers over the past week, an average of 180,000 came from ERC-20 USDT:

The rise of USDT-ETH can be traced back to several major exchanges either abandoning the Omni Protocol altogether or introducing support for its ERC-20 counterpart:

• On February 27th, Huobi announced support for deposits & withdrawals in Tether ERC20
• On July 3rd, Binance announced it would phase out Omni-based Tether and open only ERC-20 wallets for the stablecoin
• The same day, Poloniex announced support for ERC-20 Tether

Tether’s rise on Ethereum could be attributed to several reasons, including the fact that ERC-20 Tether is faster and requires less fees (making it better suited for arbitrage and trading), as well as the company’s attempt to diversify its protocol holdings and migrate to a more actively developed and maintained protocol.

Whatever the case, over the summer - and especially the last month - the amount of ERC-20 USDT’s daily active addresses has absolutely ballooned. In the past week, all but one day recorded over 100,000 active USDT-ETH addresses:

That chart is unlikely to plateau either, as Tether announced yesterday that it’s converting another 300 million USDT to the ERC-20 protocol:

Simultaneously, the share of ERC-20 Tether on exchanges has been steadily dropping over the last month:

As expected, the share of Tether-related gas fees has been on a decided uptrend as well:

While some have been voicing concerns about the Ethereum network’s congestion and scalability issues in light of ERC-20 Tether’s growth, it’s also worth looking at the situation from a different angle. People are now proving to be willing to pay good money to interact with the Ethereum network, which is a particularly strong validation for the growing field of DeFi apps and projects building on Ethereum.