Stablecoin Demand Surges as USDC Supply Surpasses $3Bn, Tether Closes on $20Bn

The demand for digital dollars is soaring and the second-largest stablecoin in the crypto ecosystem has just reached a new circulation milestone.

The Centre Consortium’s USD Coin has just surpassed 3 billion in circulation, growing by nearly 500% in 2020 according to a blog post today. The founding members of the consortium are Circle and Coinbase and their USDC stablecoin is shaping up to rival the industry standard Bitfinex dollar pegged coin, Tether.

The blog post added that since launching in 2018, USDC has supported more than $230 billion in on-chain transactions, spanning diverse industries and use cases. The most recent of which has been in the decentralized finance sector where the asset is often used as a pair for liquidity pools.

Total value locked in DeFi protocols recently reached an all-time high of just below $15 billion which is an increase of over 2000% this year alone.

David Puth, Centre CEO, commented;

“The accelerated growth of USDC over the course of this year is the result of our active work to establish an open standard for fiat digital currency on the internet,”

He added that he fully expects that the adoption of USDC will continue to expand globally and that growth will continue at a very strong pace. According to Coingecko, USDC is now the thirteenth largest crypto asset in terms of market capitalization, just behind Bitcoin SV.

Tether Supply Surges

USDC, which recently partnered with Visa, is not the only stablecoin experiencing monumental growth in 2020. The industry standard, Tether, has also hit a record high in terms of supply which is just shy of $20 billion.

According to the Tether Transparency report, there are $19.88 billion USDT in circulation, an increase of 360% so far this year. Of that total, 62% or $12.4 billion is currently on the ERC-20 token standard running on the Ethereum network.

$1.33 billion is on Bitcoin’s Omni network while $6.3 billion USDT is operating on the Tron network. There are smaller amounts on the EOS, Liquid, SLP, and OMG networks.

Digital Dollars in Demand

USDT and USDC are the two largest stablecoins by market capitalization but others are also surging in terms of supply. MakerDAO’s Dai stablecoin has also hit an all-time high of just over $1 billion this week, an increase of over 2300% since the beginning of 2020.

Binance’s stablecoin BUSD is the fourth largest with a market cap of $670 million, while Paxos is down in fifth with $390 million.