From Omni, TRX, Ethereum, among other blockchains, Tether (USDT) is now available on Solana. Developers of the high-speed layer-one blockchain have it that the platform is 50,000X faster than Ethereum. At the same time, Sam Bankman-Fried holds that the decentralized protocol is a million times cheaper than Ethereum.
The First Stablecoin, the Eighth Blockchain
USDT will be the first stablecoin to launch on Solana. According to the coin’s issuer, Tether, the blockchain can offer speeds of up to 50,000 transactions per second with $0.00001 or less charged per transaction.
This is a great contrast to Ethereum’s speed and fees. Specifically, USDT users spend approximately $10 on transaction fees due to its DeFi-induced popularity, while the network can hold roughly 15 transactions per second only.
The Solana-USDT integration brings the total number of decentralized platforms supporting USDT to eight, after EOS, Algorand, OMG Network, Ethereum, Omni, and Liquid Network. Although USDT trading is most active on Ethereum, many users have opted to migrate to other platforms to save on transaction fees.
According to Solana’s creator, Anatoly Yakovenko, the platform’s speed is engineered to handle transactions at the rate of Nasdaq, a leading stock exchange, and Tether has helped it achieve that dream.
Currently, USDT is the most used stablecoin on the decentralized finance (DeFi) scene, with a cumulative $863 million locked in top DeFi networks such as UniSwap, Aave, and Curve.
Solana (SOL) Price Reacts to USDT Launch
A look at the price charts on CoinmarketCap indicates that Solana’s native token, SOL, reacted positively to the news. For instance, on May 8, a day before news spread of the launch, the token closed the day trading at $2.47 with a volume of $10.16 million and a market capitalization of $84.81 million.
However, on May 9, the coin closed the day changing hands at $3.64 and a trading volume and market cap of $52.35 million and $125.9 million. At the time of writing, SOL had gained 51.80 percent in the last 24 hours.
More Activities on Solana
In August 2020, Solana introduced the Serum Project, a new decentralized derivatives exchange backed by FTX, a crypto derivatives platform, and Alameda Research. The DEX is built to tap into the nascent DeFi ecosystem. Furthermore, it can communicate with the Ethereum blockchain, which houses a large number of Decentralized protocols. In exchange, SOL was listed on FTX.
FTX’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, claims that Solana, compared to Ethereum, is “a million times cheaper.” The CEO added that Solana’s awesomeness also comes from its speed that is 10,000 times that of Ethereum.
Apart from Serum and Tether, Solana’s scalability potential has attracted other blockchain platforms such as Kin that had previously found a home on Ethereum. Other platforms that have announced possible integrations with Solana include Torus, a key management system, and Chainlink, a distributed oracle system.