Altcoins
Tether’s migration from Bitcoin’s OMNI to Ethereum drives ETH’s daily transaction fees to the top
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Tether [USDT] has been in the news lately owing to the various developments in its ecosystem. The stablecoin recently moved from Bitcoin’s OMNI layer onto the Ethereum network. More recently, Tether launched a stablecoin pegged to the Chinese yuan called CNHT, which will operate on the Ethereum blockchain.
Tether’s migration from Bitcoin’s OMNI to the Ethereum network seems to have benefitted Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum. The second-largest coin by market cap, ETH is on the brink of surpassing BTC in terms of daily transaction fees. As per Coin Metrics’ report, Bitcoin’s daily transaction fee was at $185,993, while ETH’s was at $182,899, as of 15 September 2019. Similar trends have been seen throughout 2019. However, the reason behind this time’s trend seems to be Tether’s migration. The transaction fees quite often encapsulate real network demand and usage.
Source – Coin Metrics
When Tether was operating on Bitcoin’s OMNI, the transaction count witnessed a massive increase and starting from April 2019, it started hitting several new all-time highs. On 7 August, the transaction count of USDT reached 91,513, which is the highest so far. But, when USDT moved to the Ethereum network, USDT-ETH soared to hit an all-time high of 187,912 daily transactions, as of 9 September.
Source – Coin Metrics
Since mid-August, USDT-ETH has been constituting about 10% of the total Ethereum transactions and on 8 September, 25% of Ethereum’s transactions were from the Ethereum version of Tether.
Source – Coin Metrics
Additionally, factors like daily adjusted transfer value and daily gas usage were also seen to be soaring up due to USDT-ETH as both reached their respective all-time highs. The report also revealed that over the last 30 days, Tether was the biggest gas spender out of all the other Ethereum contracts.
Bitcoin is the world’s largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $183 billion and a price of $10,233, at press time, while ETH stands second with a market cap of $23 billion and a price of $213. It would seem that the huge difference in price doesn’t matter as ETH was seen beating BTC in terms of fee revenue over the last 30 days as well.
Source – Coin Metrics
