According to a tweet posted by Messari’s researcher Ryan Watkins, the share of ERC20 tokens is approaching 50 percent of the total value stored on the Ethereum blockchain.   

Watkins claims that this underscores ‘a complete transformation’ of the second-largest blockchain.  

The flippening no one expected 

ERC20 coins are now on the verge of flipping ETH, the token that underpins the network. This is not exactly the kind of flippening that the Ethereum community expected to see just a couple of years.  

In June 2017, when the ICO hype was close to reaching its peak, it seemed likely that the new kid on the block was able to topple Bitcoin. However, after the bubble due to the proliferation of bad projects and blatant scams, the ETH price tanked more than 85 percent from its January 2018 high.    

However, Watkins also notes that Ether now servers as the reserve asset of the mushrooming decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, which has now become its primary use case.    

Blame Tether 

Back in January, stablecoins already flipped Ethereum in terms of the total transfer value. 

It was caused by the explosive growth of the ERC20 version of the Tether stablecoin. According to Etherscan, its market cap already has already surpassed $5.7 bln, which constitutes 63 percent of the coin’s total circulating supply that is now steadfastly approaching the $10 bln mark.

In mid-2019, the amount of Tether tokens issued on the Bitcoin-based Omni layer started to decline at a rapid pace, and the Ethereum version eventually took its crown in October 2019.