The competition continues to build up between stablecoins, as the second-largest stablecoin USDC pursues Tether in terms of market capitalization. Circle co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire shared this bit of the news on his Twitter and added more data about its stablecoin’s progress.
With the shifting dynamics in cryptocurrencies, it was not strange for USDC to bite into USDT’s market share. Tether’s dominance was visibly falling and USDC remained as a popular alternative for the users. Allaire shared that USDC’s progress can be traced back to its growing ecosystem, adding that USDC has noted 10,000% growth over the past two years.
The falling dominance of Tether combined with the growing USDC ecosystem pushed the stablecoin supply to $177 billion, currently. This was nearly 9.7% of the total crypto market capitalization, which tells the success story of USDC in the changing market. Tether still commanded around 45% of that total with Circle now taking up 29% share as the tussle between the two continued.
To put thing competition in perspective, last year Tether’s share was around 74%, while Circles was just at 16% of the stablecoin pie. However, a lot has changed for Circle’s stablecoin in a year. Its market cap grew by 987% in 2021 as per data provided by CoinGecko. Additionally, its network saw $2.5 trillion in on-chain transactions and 4.6 million active wallet addresses in 2021.
USDC currently runs on eight different blockchains and is supported by 200 protocols, as per Allaire. The stablecoin can be traded in 180 countries on 34 exchanges. Meanwhile, Tether’s supply did not grow as much as USDC and saw a 275% increase in 2021.
The second-largest stable asset already flipped USDT on the Ethereum network earlier in January. Tether is mainly split between Ethereum and Tron with 39 billion and 36 billion USDT respectively. However, there was a part of supply also available on Solana, Omni, and Algorand. Nevertheless, Circle has also announced to expand to a similar multi-chain ecosystem with support on the Flow network.
It added in an official release,
“Flow led the NFT mainstream adoption with innovative platforms like NBA Top Shot and many others. Millions of users will be introduced to innovative DeFi products for the first time on Flow, where USDC will play a vital role. USDC is the most trusted dollar digital currency and by making it available to all developers on Flow, it will continue to catalyze mainstream adoption of dApps.”
In addition to Flow, Circle now supported USDC natively across the Ethereum, Algorand, Solana, Stellar, Tron, Hedera, and Avalanche blockchains.