USDT Just Showed Crypto's Future

Over the past 24 hours, the market caps of ETH and USDT have been running neck and neck. Yesterday, USDT's market cap even briefly overtook ETH's - a first in the history of crypto markets, and almost certainly not the last.

For now, USDT's short-lived move into second place came on the back of a declining ETH price. If that slide continues, USDT could hold the #2 spot for a while. But further down the road, ETH's price won't be the deciding factor - and neither will BTC's.

The current parity between ETH and USDT market caps is the first clear sign of something I explored in my article "Who Will Replace Bitcoin at the Top." The market capitalization of traditional-economy assets - the U.S. dollar among them - is enormous. If even a meaningful share of those assets gets tokenized, the resulting tokens will dominate the top of CoinMarketCap. Not just Ether - even Bitcoin won't be able to hold its ground.

USDT is a tokenized dollar. And since a tokenized dollar is simply more practical than cash or money in a bank account, more and more dollars will shift into tokenized form. In market cap rankings, it might actually make more sense to look at all dollar-backed stablecoins together, rather than treating USDT as a single unified entity. It is not entirely clear why it should be counted that way to begin with. After all, USDT on TON and USDT on Solana are completely different tokens. If a merchant accepts one, you cannot pay with the other. You would have to swap one USDT for another first.

And the best place for swaps like that is rabbit.io: best rates, and everything is simple, clear, and convenient.