Trade Wars: Huobi Adds Support for TRC20 Tether with offer; Will it Pump Up the Volume?

There’s never a quiet week in TRONland, from where TRON CEO Justin Sun oversees an ever-expanding digital network. When he’s not making announcements about making announcements, the TRON founder is toasting tangible new successes that are slowly cementing the network’s infiltration into every last recess of the cryptosphere. Huobi and Binance’s decision to support TRC20-USDT, aka TRON Tether, is the latest manifestation of this.

In military circles, the term “mission creep” describes an operation that strays far beyond the remit of its original brief. It’s a description that could aptly be applied to the TRON network which, through a series of acquisitions, pivots, and integrations, has evolved into something greater than the “open-source protocol for the global digital entertainment industry” that was first proffered, back in the mists of 2017. Today, TRON is a multi-purpose dApp network, payment protocol, and scalable blockchain whose utility has been greatly boosted by the addition of Tether and the ongoing support of exchange giants Huobi and Binance.

Huobi Welcomes a New Taste of Tether

Huobi, just like Binance before them, have announced support for TR20-USDT. Until November 1, Huobi users will benefit from trading TRON-based Tether on the exchange, to the tune of 30% APR in the case of those boasting net deposits of over 100 TRC20-USDT, vastly exceeding the sort of returns typically available from crypto lending platforms. The top 20 traders, meanwhile, will take a share of 320,000 TRC20-USDT, distributed among six user tiers.

An integrated digital asset trading hub, Huobi has made over $1.2 trillion in transactions since entering the scene in 2013, allowing users to trade over 200 tokens across spot, margin, contracts and fiat quickly and cost-effectively. At one stage, it enjoyed a 50% share of the global digital asset market, making it by far the biggest crypto exchange in the world. Today, Huobi remains one of the go-to platforms for high-volume traders in particular.

The addition of the USDT stablecoin to the TRON network, which was first announced in March, coupled with a Huobi tie-in to mark its introduction, might not seem like a big deal, but its significance becomes apparent once Tether’s dominance is taken into account. On any given day, it is the most traded digital asset in the cryptosphere by some distance, with $16 billion swapped in the last 24 hours alone, $3 billion more than BTC.

Pump Up the Volume

TRON’s implementation of the ubiquitous stablecoin has propelled TRC20-USDT into the top give stablecoins by volume already. Huobi’s willingness to embrace TRON Tether has also helped in that respect: the exchange is active in over 130 countries, including Turkey where it’s just announced a Lira-USDT gateway. Binance became the largest TRX holder when it introduced staking for TRON’s native token last month. Should Huobi follow suit, there’s every chance that it could oust Binance to become the largest TRON super representative.

Given that the CZ’s exchange holds one sixth of all TRX in circulation, having locked up 12 billion tokens in September, there’s no doubting Binance’s commitment to TRON moving forwards. Nor is there reason to doubt Huobi’s; the exchange has released as many major announcements as Justin Sun lately, demonstrating that its leadership has no desire to be seen resting on its laurels. In today’s hyper-competitive crypto industry, the winning exchanges and blockchains are the ones that don’t stop innovating, partnering, and integrating. Justin Sun learned this a long time ago. So too did Changpeng Zhao and his Huobi counterpart Leon Li.

Never one for understatement, Sun promised his Twitter followers on October 15 that “Soon TRC20 $USDT will be the largest stablecoin in the world!” Should that occur, he’ll partly have Binance and Huobi to thank.