The surge follows Binance’s decision a week ago to eliminate the zero-fee trading discount on the platform except for the BTC-TUSD pair.
Trading with the TrueUSD (TUSD) stablecoin has surged over the week, crypto price tracker CoinGecko’s data shows, a result of crypto exchange Binance’s support for the token, including a zero-fee discount to buy and sell bitcoin (BTC).
TUSD’s 24-hour trading volume surpassed $1 billion for most of Thursday and Friday, according to CoinGecko. It is a significant increase from earlier this month, when TUSD recorded mostly sub-$100 million daily trading volume.
The BTC-TUSD pair on Binance alone recorded $713 million in trading volume in the past 24 hours, per Binance’s data.
The stablecoin’s recent popularity comes after Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, picked TUSD as a favored stablecoin trading pair on its platform amid a regulatory crackdown on its namesake Binance USD (BUSD). New York regulators ordered BUSD issuer Paxos, a fintech firm based in the state, to stop minting these tokens.
Binance had supported BUSD through a zero-fee trading promotion and by booting rival stablecoins including TUSD from its platform.
Following the New York directive for Paxos, Binance reintroduced trading with TUSD in early March, then granted a zero-fee trading promotion exclusively to the BTC-TUSD pair starting March 22. This week, the exchange expanded TUSD trading to popular cryptocurrencies, including solana (SOL), optimism (OP), polygon (MATIC) and XRP.
In an email to CoinDesk last week, Clara Medalie, head of research at crypto markets data provider Kaiko, wrote that Binance had “crowned a possible successor” to its namesake stablecoin in TUSD.
The token’s rapid growth highlights a major reshuffling of the $132 billion stablecoin market, which has been wrestling with ongoing regulatory actions and a banking crisis. TUSD has been one of the winners so far. Its market capitalization has mushroomed to $2 billion from below $800 million at the start of January, making it the fifth largest stablecoin.
TUSD is issued by digital asset firm ArchBlock, and its intellectual property is owned by an Asian investment conglomerate Techteryx, CoinDesk has reported. Some reports linked the token to crypto investor Justin Sun, who was recently sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for market manipulation, but issuer ArchBlock denied his involvement.
This article was originally published by CoinDesk.
