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Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why this is on the "TRON" blockchain? I thought Tether was on Ethereum.

Tether operates on a bunch of chains including Ethereum, TRON, and Omni.

Just about every Ethereum competitor has some equivalent to ERC20 tokens. I'm surprised Tether dedicated 1 Billion USDT to TRON but its likely because they don't think there will be any repercussions for creating liquidity out of thin air.

A huge amount of Tether is TRC20 (if memory serves, the majority). Tron is very China centric, and Tether has massive connections to Chinese capital control evasion.

Nah, most of USDT is on TRC20 because gas fees are way cheaper there and most of the exchanges support withdrawing USDT using TRC20.

So all arbitrageurs, market makers, etc, transfer USDT between different entities through TRC20 network. USDT on TRC20 started to increase only after Ethereum gas fees got ridiculously high and it became too expensive to use even for pretty high volume market makers.

Absolutely not. Large Tron issuances started well before Ethereum gas fees soared. We are talking a couple of years ago.

Also, market makers moving Tether around do not give two shits about $60 in gas fees or whatever. Additionally, a huge amount of Tether has gone into DeFi on Ethereum and L2s (or bridged to newer L1s, which typically don't have a Tron bridge).

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/decentralized-finance/st...

Ethereum was dominating TRON until very recently and this does have to do with huge increases in Gas prices on Ethereum

Sure, but go back two years, Tron had 50% of the Eth issuance which is insane given that even two years ago, Eth was domination Tron in every respect.

In fact Tether is on pretty much all chains.

The ice-nine of crypto.

Because it’s faster and cheaper

TRON is used for tether payments in Southeast Asia, so there’s a decent amount of volume there. These tether takes eg “printed out of thin air” etc are tiresome. They also do billions in redemptions. Even if half their commercial paper was in Chinese real estate developers (which I think is a dumb rumor), it’s still likely they end up 90%+ collateralized if everything suddenly moved against them. Around halfway thru this podcast Sam bankman-fried + Matt Levine do some scenario analysis https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Oy0ZRklDSMMu40PTDiyOd?si=M...

My take on all of it is that the tether doomers have no idea what they’re talking about. Even the UT finance professors’ charts can be explained by the simple idea that people that made a lot of money in crypto wanted to take some of it off the table.

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