Tether, the company operating the blockchain-enabled platform tether.to that powers the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, today announced that Tether tokens (USDt) are live on Hermez Network, a decentralized zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup).
USDt is the first stablecoin to go live on Hermez’s Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, which is designed to improve scalability on the protocol to ensure cheaper transactions and token transfers.
Surging user activity on the network over recent months has resulted in a spike in Ethereum gas fees. Zero-knowledge rollups (zk-rollups) provide a solution to the subsequent transaction bottlenecks.
“We’re delighted to be the first to launch on Hermez,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Tether. “This demonstrates our commitment to solving the issues of scalability and high transaction fees on the Ethereum network. Tether takes its pivotal role in the digital token ecosystem seriously. We’re committed to overcoming technical hurdles while doing our utmost to make manifest the many great projects that developers are working on in our space.”
As the most liquid, stable, and innovative stablecoin, USDt’s market capitalization has grown to over USD $45 billion. Tether works across a diversity of different blockchains, including Algorand, Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni, Solana, and Tron. Tether is driven to support and empower growing ventures and innovation in the blockchain space.
“By onboarding the USDt stablecoin, we are incentivizing transactions on layer 2 and decreasing congestion and fee pressure on layer-1,” said Antoni Martin, Co-Founder of Hermez. “This is a win-win situation for users and stablecoin issuers as it will reduce friction and increase velocity.”
The Hermez zk-rollup, which was announced at EDCON in August 2020, is a layer 2 construction that scales Ethereum by rolling multiple transfers into a single transaction.