Tron edges over Ethereum: What it means for you

• Tron transactions were five times that of Ethereum.
• Both TVLs increased, but Ethereum maintained the top spot.

The number of transactions on the Tron [TRX] blockchain surpassed that of Ethereum [ETH] five-fold on 17 September, Tron DAO revealed. The DAO, which got its data from Nansen, showed that Tron’s transactions on the said data were 4.5 million.

Realistic or not, here’s TRX’s market cap in ETH terms

Ethereum, on the other hand, registered a total of 880,000 transactions. The disparity in transactions meant that there were more people transacting on the Tron blockchain on 20 September, as compared to Ethereum.

“Fast” is the people’s desire

Although both blockchains make use of smart contracts, Tron edges out Ethereum with its vital function in gaming and gambling applications. Besides that, the underlying blockchain of Tron allows for faster transactions than Ethereum.

This capability is a major reason most stablecoin transactions, especially from Tether [USDT], pass through the TRC-20 token standard than Ethereum’s ERC-20.

For instance, Tron’s block length and transaction cost allow it to process 2,000 transactions per second. Meanwhile, Ethereum is far behind with higher gas fees and transaction speed that does not supersede the pace of Tron.

Another reason Tron has been able to beat Ethereum to the higher transaction number is its adoption rate in Asia. To back this up, a Chainalysis report in 2020 referred to East Asia as the world’s biggest stablecoins market.

Source: Chainalysis

At that time, Tether, which is the largest stablecoin per market cap, was also the most used stablecoin in the region. While that has not changed, traders in the region also prefer to employ the TRC-20 model of transacting due to its lightning speed.

Again, Tron trumps Ethereum

Apart from leading Ethereum in terms of transactions, Tron has also been the driving force leading the revival of the DeFi TVL. For the uninitiated, DeFi’s overall TVL has not been performing well over the last few weeks.

This was evident in the notable decrease in most protocols and chains. However, at press time, almost every chain had recorded a significant increase in TVL, with Tron’s 20.74% increase being the highest in the last seven days

The TVL is a metric used to measure the total value of assets locked to staked in a particular platform. When the TVL increases, it means the project involved has become more trustworthy. 

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However, a decrease in the TVL implies that market participants perceive the DeFi platform or dApp to be less trustworthy. Hence, this results in a decrease in smart contracts’ liquidity attached to it.

Source: DefiLlama

But in Tron’s case, its TVL rose to 6.66 billion, while Ethereum had a higher TVL of $21.18 billion. However, the latter only registered a 7.41% increase within the same timeframe, Tron increased by double digits.