In late February, Binance started using TrueUSD (TUSD) as its dollar-pegged cryptocurrency of choice, causing TUSD to become the fifth largest stablecoin by market cap. The BTC/TUSD trading pair surpassed 50% of Binance’s Bitcoin trading share, overtaking BTC/USDT last week, indicating that TUSD could be Tether’s next rival. According to an analysis from Kaiko, BTC/TUSD became Binance’s largest Bitcoin market last week, after BTC/USDT had an overwhelming dominance as recently as last month.
Tether (USDT) was launched by Tether back in 2014 as one of the first-dollar-pegged stablecoins and currently has the largest market cap of such tokens with over $80 billion in value as of April 2023. It remains pegged to the dollar using liquid reserves comprising of cash and short-term US Treasury bills. USDT leads its largest competitor, Circle’s USDC, and gained further ground when Binance replaced USDC with BUSD at its exchange in September. However, BUSD issuer Paxos was forced by US regulators to begin winding down operations in February, leading Binance to mint tens of millions of dollars in TUSD. TUSD’s market cap as of April 17 is over $2 billion, compared to roughly $966 million on February 27. TrueUSD uses a real-time proof of reserves system in partnership with Chainlink to ensure its stablecoin is fully backed by over $2.15 billion in bank reserves at all times.
By late March, Binance had added new TUSD trading pairs, including LDO/TUSD, MATIC/TUSD, OP/TUSD, SOL/TUSD, SSV/TUSD, and XRP/TUSD. It also made TUSD the only stablecoin to inherit its zero-fee BTC trading fee policy after March 22, coinciding with the point at which BTC/TUSD volume on Binance began to overtake other Bitcoin pairs.
As of April 17, TUSD’s market cap is over $2 billion, and its 24-hour total volume is $226 million. In comparison, USDT’s daily volume is currently the highest among all cryptocurrencies, at $31.5 billion.
