Over the last one year period, stablecoins added more than $5 billion in total market value. Earlier in 2020 stablecoin demand was pushed higher as traders sought stability with digital currencies declining considerably following the COVID-19 inspired sell-off. Since this time digital currencies, such as bitcoin and ether, recovered a significant amount of market losses. Demand for stablecoins, however, has not slowed and continues to push total market cap higher. This past week, total market cap across the leading stablecoins reached an all-time high. Nearly all major stablecoins follow ERC-20 standard specifications. Tether (USDT) for instance, which maintains the largest stablecoin market cap, has multiple iterations yet the largest and most used iteration is built on the Ethereum blockchain. As transactional activity on the Ethereum blockchain has increased, fees paid out from network users, on a notional basis, have also reached a recent high. While per transaction fees on Ethereum are considerably lower than those associated with traditional financial payment networks, such as Visa and Mastercard, the increase in transactional activity has led to a considerable increase in aggregate fee volumes.

https://tradeblock.com/blog/ethereum-fundamentals-strengthen-price-rallies