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Tron Loses 23% of Its $4.3B USDT Reserves to DeFi Hotbed Ethereum

A "3rd party" crypto exchange ordered the swap. Signs point to Binance.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 9:46 a.m. Published Aug 20, 2020, 7:39 p.m.

The chain swap happened early Thursday morning. (Shutterstock)

Stablecoin issuer Tether shifted 1 billion in USDT from the Tron blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain in an early morning chain swap Thursday.

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Swapped in conjunction "with a 3rd party," according to a Tether tweet, the token transfer drains 23% of TRON's USDT reserves, which previously stocked $4.3 billion in the stablecoin.
It also pumps up Ethereum's reserves, where well over half of the nearly $13 billion circulating USDT already reside. Ethereum is a hotbed for decentralized finance projects and as such a popular spot for USDT.
Tether has played a notable role in the Ethereum blockchain's recent congestion, according to Decrypt.
Big-dollar USDT transfers and billion-token burns spotted by the exchange-tracking Twitter account Whale Alert suggest that Binance may be the third party that ordered the swap.

Ethereum Tether Tron CoinFlash

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.