Bitfinex, a state-of-the-art digital asset trading platform, has integrated Tether (USDt) into the OMG Network, a platform that enables peer-to-peer transactions in real-time, in an initiative that enhances the scalability of the Ethereum network.The integration of USDt onto the OMG Network will result in a reduction of confirmation times delivering faster payments while fees will be reduced without compromising on-chain security. USDt deposits and withdrawals on the OMG Network will be enabled via the Bitfinex platform.
“Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the OMG Network that supports thousands of transactions per second at a third of the cost of the same transaction on Ethereum,” says Vansa Chatikavanij, CEO at OMG Network. “We’re delighted to partner with Bitfinex to address these fundamental issues and drive further growth and adoption of open financial services.”
“At Bitfinex we are committed to driving innovation and improvements to our service to better support our customers,” says Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex. “By migrating USDt value transfers to the OMG Network we save costs, drive performance improvements and relieve pressure on the root chain network. This is good for Bitfinex and our customers, and the whole Ethereum ecosystem.”
Transfering USDt as an ERC20 token requires a minimum of 0.001 Ethereum as the miner fee per transaction. Plasma allows numerous transactions to be sent with only one fee. “This will allow traders to react faster to trading opportunities and take advantage of arbitrage more efficiently between exchanges as the network grows,” said Ardoino.
The Ethereum blockchain is a valuable but limited resource, which, under heavy demand is vulnerable to severe network congestion. As each block has only a finite space available to users, total transaction throughput is capped at approximately 12 TPS. When transaction demand exceeds 12 TPS, settlement times increase and gas costs can rise significantly.
One such extreme congestion event occurred in March this year when the price of Ethereum crashed from USD240 to USD107, liquidating more than USD10 billion from the market. The huge spike in demand from users looking to trade in response to the volatile price swings resulted in average network waiting times rising from 15 seconds to 44 minutes.
Token exchange is the largest category of usage for Ethereum, and with its growing dominance and success USDt transactions now consume more gas than the nearest 10 biggest protocols and applications combined. Scaling Ethereum is a critical issue to solve today and will reduce costs and drive performance for all the services and applications built on the network.
USDt’s total market capitalisation has more than quadrupled from about $2 billion in February 2019 to reach USD9 billion. Tether works with Algorand, Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni and Tron. Tether is driven to support and empower growing ventures and innovation in the blockchain space.
