Tether gaining popularity as a payment method! Tether gaining popularity comes at a cost to Ether and some analysts see it catching up with Bitcoin and Ether!
As Bloomberg reported on Oct. 25, CoinPayments registered Tether as a means of payment. The cryptocurrency currently accounts for 30% of the volume – 30 times more than a year ago. CoinPayments has a 2.4 million person user base.
Bitcoin as a payment option, however, has seen a nearly 60% drop in volume from 80% last year. Tether has pushed Ether out of second place. Users are supposedly choosing Tether due to the stablecoin’s resilience to market fluctuations. Sean Mackey, operations lead at CoinPayments.net, said:
“Merchants used to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and convert it into Tether in order to hedge against the volatility. Now we are seeing the payments just being done directly in Tether.”
Tether has also seen adoption from merchants who have difficulty utilizing traditional payment remittance services or are forced to pay high card processing fees.
Last month, Tether minted 300 million USDT as part of their swap from the Omni protocol to the Ethereum blockchain. In July? tether accidentally minter and subsequently burned 5 billion USDT tokens.
Tether is also delving into another growing market – CNHT, the Chinese Yuan backed stablecoin will join USDT and EURT, the Euro backed equivalent. They also plan to offer versions backed by commodities such as Gold, crude oil, and rubber.
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