Tron is Eating into Ethereum’s Share of the Tether Market, But It Will Have to Do More to Become a Serious Rival

cryptonews.com:

Tron (TRX) has long been the butt of jokes and insults from much of the crypto sector, stretching back to 2019 (and even earlier) and continuing to the present day.

Yet in the past year or so, it has become an increasingly hard-to-ignore Ethereum (ETH) rival, exemplified by the fact that the supply of tether (USDT) stablecoin on its blockchain has overtaken Ethereum’s own supply on numerous occasions.

As of writing, both blockchains have more or less the same amount of USDT -- USD 32bn -- on their respective networks, while Tron itself has recently celebrated it having reached 100m active accounts. Such figures paint the picture of a steadily growing network, in particular one that could challenge Ethereum’s dominance of the crypto sector at some point in the future.

However, opinion is well and truly mixed on the question of whether Tron is a serious Ethereum rival, with Ethereum supporters arguing that few meaningful projects are building on the smaller blockchain. Still, others contend that Tron’s growing supply of USDT and lower fees could help it expand further, a process helped by Ethereum’s delays in moving to proof-of-stake.

Aside from its large supply of USDT, there’s one area where Tron clearly outstrips Ethereum: daily transactions. Based on figures from Etherscan and Tronscan, Ethereum has generally been managing between 1m and 1.3m transactions per day for about a year and a half, while Tron has been processing more than 3m over the same period.

In fact, in recent months Tron’s daily transaction count has risen from 4m to around 6m since April. This is a fact acknowledged by the Ethereum community and ConsenSys’ DeFi Economist David Shuttleworth says that there’s a simple reason for this.

“In short, Tron is much