On Friday (March 22), Justin Sun, the founder and CEO of TRON Foundation, formally announced a plan to reward early adopters of stablecoin USDT-TRON (which is USDT issued by Tether on the TRON network).

It all started on March 4th when Tether and TRON announced a new collaboration with the aim of launching TRON-based USDT that is compatible with the TRC-20 standard, which would allow tokenized USD to be transferred over the TRON network.

According to the press release shared with CryptoGlobe at the time, the addition of Tether to the TRON blockchain “enables TRON to greatly elevate its existing decentralised applications (DApps) ecosystem, improve overall value storage, and increase Decentralised Exchange (DEX) liquidity,” as well as making the TRON blockchain “more accessible to the enterprise-level partners and institutional investors.” We were also told that the two companies expected to implement this new TRC-20 token by “early second quarter.”

At this point, it is worth noting that this announcement meant that there were now three versions of Tether (USDT):

  • USDT-Omni (aka USDT): Tether issued on the Bitcoin network via the Omni Layer protocol.
  • USDT-ERC20: Tether issued on the Ethereum network via the ERC-20 protocol.
  • USDT-TRON: Tether issued on the TRON network via the TRC-20 protocol.

According to the TRON developers' documentation, “TRC‌-20 is a technical standard used for smart contracts on the TRON blockchain for implementing tokens with the TRON Virtual Machine (TVM)” that is “fully compatible to ERC‌-20.”

The next time that we got more news about USDT-TRON was on March 14, day 2 of the TOKEN2049 conference in Hong Kong, when Justin was presenting a progress report on the TRON platform. Here is what Justin said about TRON’s new stablecoin:

  • This smart contract has already being deployed on TRON’s testnet, and the plan is to launch it on the mainnet in early April.
  • USDT-TRON has the following advantages over USDT-Omni: instant transactions instead of up to three hours; free transactions as opposed to $6-$7 per transaction; and use cases not limited to trading (e.g. can be used on decentralized exchange DApps and within the BitTorrent ecosystem).

On March 21, two major cryptocurrency exchanges Huobi Global and OKEx announced their support for USDT-TRON.

And the following day, TRON Foundation issued a press release that said Justin had announced “a new incentive plan to reward USDT-TRON holders who have adopted Tether’s newest stablecoin into their portfolios.” More specifically, it said that this was a “100-day giveaway beginning April 30, offering to pay out interest rates as high as 20 percent to USDT-TRON holders over that period,” that both Huobi and OKEx support the giveaway, and that “the total outlay is expected to exceed $20 million.”

There was also the following comment from Justin:

“USDT-TRON will minimize volatility across the TRON blockchain and boost confidence in the ecosystem. To enable speedy adoption, I'm personally offering this incentive plan to help advance the potential of decentralized finance through USDT-TRON.”

It seems that what TRON Foundation was referring to was this tweet that Justin had sent out earlier: