USDC, the world’s second-biggest stablecoin by market capitalization recently hit a new milestone as it crossed the $50 billion mark of the dollar-pegged asset circulating supply, looking to topple the dominance of the current leader, Tether [USDT] in the stablecoin landscape.
In fact, just two weeks ago, the cumulative supply for USDC on Ethereum has overtaken that of Tether, putting USDT in second place on Ethereum for the first time.
At present, Tether supply is mostly split between Ethereum and Tron, with nearly 39 billion and 36 billion USDT on each network, respectively, and the rest on others such as Solana [SOL], Omni [OMNI], and Algorand [ALGO], according to its transparency report.
Sharing the latest news via Twitter, the USDC creator Circle published a blog detailing the exponential trajectory of the stablecoin which has grown 10x over the course of 2021. In addition to that a recent tweet by company co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire said while this is a huge number,
‘It’s the massive growth and ecosystem around it that tells the broader story.’ Adding that USDC has seen 10,000% growth over the past two years.
USDC catching on as Tether dominance diminishes
Crypto research firm Delphi Digital observed even though USDT is still the market cap leader, its growth has however slowed down compared to USDC since May 2021.
The total stablecoin supply currently stands at $177 billion, which captures 9.7% of the total crypto market capitalization. Of that, Tether commands around 45%, whereas Circle now takes a 29% share, rapidly closing the gap.
Interestingly at this time, last year Tether controlled around 74% with Circle taking a mere 16% of the stablecoin pie. According to CoinGecko, Circle’s stablecoin market capitalization rose by 987% in 2021 whereas, over the same period, Tether’s supply saw less than a third of that growth with 275%.
As per Circle’s CEO, the stablecoin network recorded $2.5 trillion in on-chain transactions and 4.6 million active wallet addresses in 2021 alone. To top that, USDC runs on eight different blockchains, is supported by 200 protocols, and can be traded in 180 countries on 34 exchanges around the world.
In addition to this, Circle on 31st January 2022 announced that the firm is expanding its USDC multichain on the Flow Network to enable users to pay on Web3.