USDT (TRC-20) has gained substantial network effects of late by providing an attractive combination of speed, cost, and stability to users globally. This will give Bitrefill customers a new way to make fiat-like payments for mobile refills and gift cards.
It’s no secret that as crypto gains in popularity, high fees and transaction delays can really ruin the experience, leading to a lot of frustration for users. This is why we have decided to add USDT over Tron, to give users a fast & cheap stable coin payment option, without the hefty fees or long confirmation delays.
USDT on Tron has seen incredible adoption
The USDT token on Tron made headlines last month, by reaching a major milestone when it surpassed USDT issuance on Ethereum after 729 days since it launched. USDT on Tron has become one of the go to methods to move funds denominated in USD, in seconds, with very little in onchain fees, making it extremely popular.
Besides witnessing high levels of cryptocurrency adoption throughout the region, USDT has been especially embraced by those in Latin America, who have adopted it as a way to quickly and cheaply send remittances back home from abroad, or doing peer to peer exchanges for fiat in an easier, less volatile way. All while avoiding restrictions, capital controls, and high fees via traditional avenues.
Gas fees have made smaller payments on Ethereum costly
As Ethereum usage increases, and blockchain congestion has risen with it, gas fees have been way higher than users were used to. This has made using Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens prohibitive for smaller transactions.
The high gas fee situation in the Ethereum ecosystem is very similar to the growing pains felt by Bitcoin users in which onchain fees skyrocketed for the first time during the 2017 bull, and this move resembles how we added Litecoin support in 2017.
Recently we added Ethereum’s ERC-20 Tether token as our first stable coin payment method, and since then we’ve had an overwhelming number of requests from our users to add the Tron based version. Easily the most requested payment method in Bitrefill’s history, and this time we can say the motivation is more usage than bagholder based.
Tether is a blockchain agnostic stablecoin
Tron is very similar to Ethereum from a technical standpoint, as it was originally forked from Ethereum’s code base, and even employs Ethereum’s Solidity smart contract language. The key difference is that Tron has incurred tradeoffs to ensure higher throughput at the cost of more centralization than Ethereum. As Tether is already centralized (issued and supported by the Tether company) this tradeoff is sensible, and the large amounts of daily users on TRC20 appear to agree.
Tether first arose out of the needs of startup cryptocurrency businesses and exchanges to send and receive USD denominated funds, in an era when most of them were being categorically denied financial services by banks.
Tether started on the Omni blockchain (an early Bitcoin-based token platform) in 2014, and has since launched an Ethereum ERC-20 version, Tron’s TRC-20 version, as well as versions on Liquid, Algorand, OMG, and SLP blockchains.
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