If you think Bitcoin is the world's most widely used cryptocurrency, you're probably wrong.
Whats the worlds most widely used cryptocurrency? If you think its Bitcoin, which accounts for about 70% of all the digital-asset worlds market value, youre probably wrong.
While concrete figures on trading volumes are hard to come by in this often murky corner of finance, data from CoinMarketCap.com show that the token with the highest daily and monthly trading volume is Tether, whose market capitalization is more than 30 times smaller. Tethers volume surpassed that of Bitcoins for the first time in April and has consistently exceeded it since early August at about $21 billion per day, the data provider says.
With Tethers monthly trading volume about 18% higher than that of Bitcoin, its arguably the most important coin in the crypto ecosystem. Tethers also one of the main reasons why regulators regard cryptocurrencies with a wary eye, and have put the breaks on crypto exchange-traded funds amid concern of market manipulation.
If there is no Tether, we lose a massive amount of daily volume -- around $1 billion or more depending on the data source, said Lex Sokolin, global financial technology co-head at ConsenSys, which offers blockchain technology. Some of the concerning potential patters of trading in the market may start to fall away.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-01/tether-not-bitcoin-likely-the-world-s-most-used-cryptocurrencyWell to start off, having the most traded volume doesn't necessarily mean a larger percentage of cryptocurrency users actually use it. It could be restricted to a fewer part of the users which trades it ti high amounts and thus, giving its numbers a pump. In terms of the real "widely-used", I think Bitcoin is still the one since it started the whole idea of blockchain and still, as you said, 70% of digital currency is still Bitcoin. It's more popular and therefore considered widely used since more people tend to use it rather than other altcoins.