Not many days ago, the launch of the tokens of the world’s leading stablecoin (USDT) on the Telegram crypto network, TON, was announced.
Yesterday Bitfinex exchange announced support for USDT on TON.
Telegram: USDT on the crypto network Ton lands on Bitfinex
TON, or “The Open Network”, is a decentralized blockchain backed by Telegram.
The project was actually born several years ago with a direct ICO of Telegram Messenger, which was later stopped by the SEC.
However, Telegram did not stop at that decision, and continued to evolve its centralized project into a decentralized crypto project called The Open Network.
Although TON is currently not under the control of Telegram in theory, behind its crypto project there is still the company that manages the second largest messaging app in the world.
Indeed, the app itself has long integrated a crypto wallet based on TON, which also supports Bitcoin and, more recently, USDT.
It is important to remember that Telegram has 900 million monthly active users, and it is the preferred messaging app in the crypto sector.
Furthermore, starting from April 2024, it launched a major communication and marketing campaign to promote TON and its integrated crypto wallet.
USDT and TON
USDT is the world’s leading stablecoin, and is composed of tokens issued on different blockchains.
With a current market capitalization of over 110 billion dollars, 57 billion USDT are on the Tron blockchain, and 50 billion on the Ethereum blockchain.
Excluding smaller blockchains with a very limited number of USDT, after Tron and Ethereum there are almost 1.9 billion USDT on Solana, and more than 1.3 billion on Avalanche.
All the other 12 blockchains on which Tether tokens are present have less than one billion USDT each.
Among these rooms in eighth place is TON, which with its 130 million USDT has easily surpassed EOS, Liquid, Algorand, Polkadot and four other blockchains.
Moreover, there are 141 million on Tezos and 160 million on Cosmos, so it is absolutely possible that TON ends up surpassing them and positioning itself in sixth place behind Omni.
Furthermore Omni, a sidechain of Bitcoin, is becoming less and less used, even though it was the first blockchain on which USDT was launched about ten years ago.
Therefore, the growth of TON among the blockchains supported by USDT is definitely important, and in the future it could become one of the most widely used chains from this point of view.
It should not be forgotten that TON is a very fast and economical blockchain, supporting a very high number of transactions per second at very low costs. From this point of view, it is probably the best among those supported by USDT.
The role of the Bitfinex exchange
Currently, there are not many exchanges that support TON.
In addition to Bitfinex, there are OKX, Bybit, HTX, Gate.io, and KuCoin among the main exchanges.
Furthermore, there are even fewer that support USDT on TON.
Bitfinex is a historic crypto exchange that belongs to the same group as Tether, and is in fact the primary market for USDT, along with Tether itself. However, Tether only handles transactions over $100,000, while Bitfinex allows the buying and selling of USDT even for much lower amounts.
It is therefore more than obvious that Bitfinex has decided to integrate USDT on TON as well, after listing the cryptocurrency Toncoin in April 2021.
The relationship between Tether and Telegram is now even closer, thanks to the fact that USDT can now be deposited or purchased on TON’s exchange, which belongs to the same corporate group.
The goal of Bitfinex is to simplify the activation of destination addresses seamlessly, eliminating any additional steps. In fact, to start transferring USDT to TON, users will only need to specify their public addresses on that network.
USDt by Tether is the first and most used stablecoin on the market, with CoinGecko reporting a market capitalization of over 109 billion dollars.
The Bitfinex token manager, Henry Child, stated:
“The Open Network has generated a lot of excitement in the cryptocurrency community and its recent announcement that it now offers USDT on its own blockchain promises that the buzz around this innovative project will continue. We are excited that Bitfinex customers will have seamless access to transferring USDT through this rising network.”