Smooth USDT is a super minimalistic wallet made specifically and only for USDT on Tron (TRC-20). The features are:
Pay for USDT transfers in USDT instead of TRX (the gas token).
Pay 50% cheaper fees than in Trust Wallet or TronLink
Why the world needs Smooth USDT and why this is not just a yet another useless gasless wallet project?
According to DefiLlama, as of this writing, there is a total of $198 billion worth of stablecoins across all blockchains. $60 billion of which is USDT on Tron. So USDT on Tron = 30% (thirty percent!!!) of ALL STABLECOINS ACROSS ALL CHAINS! This is a lot!!!
According to TronScan (Tron’s main block explorer), there are 2 MILLION USDT transfers happening on Tron EVERY SINGLE DAY!!! (For reference, there are only 200k USDT transfers on Ethereum per day and about 700k USDC transfers per day on Base).
If you look at Basescan, you will see that the vast majority of USDC transfers are DeFi related - people execute swaps, use dapps, etc. While on Tron, ALL USDT TRANSFERS ARE PURE TRANSFERS. These are just pure payments that people send each other as e.g. salary.
I know too many people personally who have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB3, but receive their salary in USDT on Tron!!! Already!!! (and 100% of these people know exactly zero about Ethereum L2s and how “fancy and cool” they are).
So, okay, while we all in the Ethereum ecosystem are trying to bring mass adoption for payments, USDT and Tron are already succeeding at it!!!
Currently people use for their USDT on Tron either:
Crypto exchanges like Binance - apparently, due to their “simplicity”.
OR non-custodial wallets - specifically Trust Wallet and TronLink.
The MAJOR problem with non-custodial wallets is that you need TRX (Tron’s gas token) every time you send money. Which is a HUGE problem for these average users.
Now, I want to emphasize this. In the Ethereum world, having a gasless wallet is nice to have because most people use defi, use CEXes, etc. While on Tron buying gas is TERRIBLY PAINFUL BECAUSE USERS JUST KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BLOCKCHAINS. Like really, these people are COMPLETELY OUT OF CRYPTO and get confused AS HELL when they just can’t send their money and don’t understand why.
And this is where Smooth USDT comes in. It’s a fully non-custodial secret phrase based wallet (like Trust Wallet or TronLink) where you pay transaction fees in USDT instead of TRX. Also, as a nice bonus, transaction fees in Smooth USDT are 50% lower than in e.g. Trust Wallet.
I hope now you are convinced why something like Smooth USDT is absolutely needed to be created.
Now, how this beautiful creation works?
The wallet is secret phrase based. Why? Because the target audience is people who use Trust Wallet / TronLink already and:
Secret phrases sound familiar to them.
Secret phrases give a sense of security (and I mean they really are secure).
This allows people to import their current secret phrase into Smooth USDT directly and preserve their wallet address and transaction history.
Not all exchanges support smart contract wallets yet (e.g. Bybit).
The wallet is currently browser-based (mobile apps are on the roadmap of course, but web apps are OK to start with).
Whenever the user creates a new wallet / imports secret phrase, an encryption key is generated locally. The secret phrase is encrypted locally with this encryption key and saved in local storage while the encryption key is sent to the Smooth USDT server. The user then needs to enter a correct pin code (which they create at sign up) to retrieve the encryption key from the server every time they log in.
The most interesting part. How gasless transfers are achieved and why the fuck are they 50% cheaper than average transfers in Trust Wallet?
So, the wallet is secret phrase based and there are no smart contracts involved. Whenever the user sends USDT:
A USDT transfer transaction is generated & signed locally with the secret phrase and (!) the signed transaction is sent to the Smooth USDT API instead of the RPC.
The API silently sends the user some gas.
The user’s signed transaction is broadcasted to the blockchain and executed.
To understand the cheap fees mechanic, we need to understand more about Tron architecture. The GAS in Tron is split into 2 things - BANDWIDTH and ENERGY. BANDWIDTH is almost negligible and ENERGY is the interesting part because it is 98% of the USDT transfer cost.
Now, the key part is staking. On Ethereum when you stake you earn ETH as block rewards. On Tron, when you stake you get ENERGY allowance. Which you can DELEGATE to other wallets and use this ENERGY to pay for transactions instead of burning the gas token (TRX) the standard way. And with this staking mechanic, we make transactions much much cheaper.
Smooth USDT has had a prototype made 6 months ago by me and Dillon Cutaiar, but we both got distracted, so it didn’t see the big world.
Since the end of Devcon in Bangkok (so, for the past 3 weeks) I have been fully remaking Smooth USDT based on the feedback that we got 6 months ago and finally… On December 5th I launched it - smoothusdt.com!
The product is ready. It’s a web application that’s already fully usable - on both mobile and desktop - and available to everyone at smoothusdt.com. Some features and optimizations need to be added here and there, but overall - it’s ready. Of course it needs to be ported as a chrome extension, as a mobile app for Android & iOS, etc., but that’s not critical.
My sole focus right now is: distribution, distribution, distribution. The wallet is ready and it is _objectively good_ and _objectively useful_ for people - all my friends are already loving it. But I need to: a) gain trust, b) make people know about Smooth USDT.
Wish me luck😝 And of course, I love to connect with great people (telegram: @nebolax0) - be it commercial or just talking.