Tether, the company behind USDT stablecoin, has seen significant growth in market capitalization, but this growth is not reflected in the Ethereum blockchain and ERC-20 tokens. Instead, Tether's growth has occurred on the Tron network, where most USDT live, amounting to $42.3 billion.

Binance and Okx hold the largest USDT balances on the network, indicating that whales and market makers prefer it due to its low fee costs. While USDT retains its dominance on centralized exchanges, it plays a marginal role on DEXs in the DeFi world, where the primacy of Circle and its USDC crypto reigns supreme. Despite having a high TVL, Tron's DeFi potential is limited due to the scarcity of projects within the ecosystem.