While the cryptocurrency market was on a rollercoaster ride this year, it was the stablecoins that witnessed exponential growth. The market has recently touched the coveted $20 billion mark with respect to the total volume of stablecoins in circulation. Tether [USDT] continued to dominate the charts despite a minor slip and still had a large fraction of supply share, while other stablecoins were starting to make up the ground.
This was revealed by the latest edition of Coin Metrics’ State of Network report which further noted that it was the growth of the second-largest stablecoin USDC growth that has been outpacing Tether causing its fall below 80%, a level unseen in the modern era of stablecoins.
Despite the fact that the values of all other stablecoins combined pales in comparison to the supply of USDT, which currently stood at $15.46 the growth of the contenders market cannot be ignored.
USDC Sets out to Eclipse USDT
The Coinbase-backed stablecoin has recorded massive gains this year. The total supply has topped $2.53 billion and is showing no signs of slowing down. USDC is essentially a centralized dollar-pegged stablecoin which is issued by the Centre Consortium, a collaboration between crypto exchange Coinbase and payment service firm Circle.
The growth was potentially triggered due to the recent explosion in DeFi’s yield farming popularity, in which the liquidity providers are incentivized for staking stablecoins and other digital assets in decentralized protocols for the use of financial activities such as loan issuance, etc.
USDC always had an edge over other stableccoins since it was the first Ethereum-based stablecoin that was launched after Tether in 2018. Furthermore, USDC already issued a supply of over $400 million before its rivals such as Huobi’s HUSD and Binance’s BUSD which were released a year later.
What further spurred the growth was the release of USDC version 2.0 in August this year which added additional security infrastructure to the USDC smart contract. With the association of industry giant such Coinbase, the stablecoin has become increasingly popular among the newcomers as well as experienced traders of the platform. And hence, USDC has managed to establish itself as a go-to asset in the DeFi sector, a major onramp within the ecosystem.