FDUSD goes up, TUSD goes down: Unraveling Binance’s moves

• FDUSD’s rise came at the cost of TUSD after the latter’s zero-fee trading program was removed.
• TUSD was still the fourth-largest stablecoin by market cap.

In a dramatic turn of events, three-month old First Digital USD [FDUSD] leapfrogged leading players to become the second-most traded stablecoin across centralized crypto exchanges (CEXes).

According to crypto market data provider Kaiko, FDUSD’s market share spectacularly lifted to 16%, trailing market leader and largest stablecoin by market cap, Tether [USDT].

Source: Kaiko

TUSD’s loss is FDUSD’s gain

FDUSD is a 1:1 USD-backed stablecoin issued by Hong Kong-based First Digital Labs that debuted on Binance [BNB] in July. As pretty evident from the graph above, FDUSD’s rise coincided with the sharp fall in market share of another stablecoin TrueUSD [TUSD].

TUSD was propped up by Binance in March following the downfall of Binance USD [BUSD] due to regulatory oversights. Binance began aggressively marketing TUSD, aided by its successful zero-fee trading program.

The promotional strategy aims at boosting trading activity by waiving off maker and taker fees for specific trading pairs. The gimmick paid off and TUSD’s market share expanded from 1% to 23% in a short span of time.

Interestingly, the majority of the volume was generated from the BTC-TUSD pair.

However, as things turned out, Binance removed the zero-fee promotion for the aforementioned pair in early September.

While a plausible reason behind the move was not yet clear, rumors of exposure to the bankrupt crypto custodian Prime Trust did the rounds for a while. TUSD’s stablecoin volume share on CEXs has since plummeted to 1% as of this writing.

Around the same time, FDUSD witnessed a sharp spike in trading activity. Incidentally, FDUSD was also promoted by Binance through its zero-fee program.

TUSD still had something to cheer about

Despite the slump in trading activity, there wasn’t any noticeable fall in TUSD’s market cap. To the contrary, it saw a marginal increase of 2.7% until press time, data from Glassnode showed.

Moreover, TUSD continued to hold on to its position as the fourth-largest stablecoin, with a market cap of $3.36 billion as of this writing.

Source: Glassnode

It remains to be seen which way the ever-evolving stablecoin landscape pivots from the current scenario. Binance’s backing of FDUSD could go a long way in cementing its position in the market.

At the same time, the gap in market capitalization between FDUSD and TUSD was huge, and it would be unfair to brand the former as the latter’s replacement.