USDC has been one of the stablecoins that has tried to grow and build a reputation as the safest and the most legit out there. It wants to be a legitimate competitor to Tether USDT, but US based and in compliance with all the regulations, unlike Tether that is an offshore company and not a subject to US regulations.
But even with all its regulation and compliance USDC had a real market test back in March 2023, when due to a bank failure it lost its peg during one weekend. Before this event, USDC was considered by most the safest stabelcoin to park your dollars.
Let’s take a look at the growth of USDC through some data.
USDC is issued by Circle. It is a US-based company that is regulated and has regular audits on its holdings.
Here we will be looking at:
- Daily USDC printed
- Monthly USDC printed
- USDC supply
- Number of daily users
- USDC chain allocation
- USDC VS USDT
The data is collected from tools like Coingecko and Dune analytics.
Daily USDC Printed
USDC started at the end of 2018, but here we have data from 2019, for simplicity, and because there is not much movement in 2018.
Here is the chart for the USDC printed per day.
As we can see in the first years there was not a lot of printing for USDC. The larger amounts started to come in 2020 and increased significantly in 2021.
At times there were more than one billion USDC issued per day.
We can notice the sharp burns that happened in March – April 2023 when the deppeging event happened. In the last months the positive bar started to dominate again, meaning more USDC is being issued again.
Monthly USDC Printed
Here is the monthly chart for better visibility.
We can see the somewhere up to 2022, there was in general more USDC monthly printed, and then in 2022 the trend shifted with almost every month being in the negative.
A massive negative bar in March 2023, when almost 10B USDC was taken out of circulation. This was during the deppeging event.
December 2023 has been slightly positive, while a bigger positive bar happened in January 2024 with 2B new USDC issued in the month. February is also on a path to have more USDC issued.
USDC Supply
The chart for the UST supply looks like this.
We can see that prior to 2020, the marketcap of USDC was negligible, with under 1B in supply. Then a huge increase in 2021 when there almost 40B USDC added to the supply.
The peak for the USDC market cap was in June 2022, with around 55B in market cap. At this time Tether was experiencing FUD, and a lot of the stablecoins were transferred to USDC.
Since the summer of 2022, the supply of USDC has almost constantly going down, with a massive drop in March 2023 .
In the last two months we have finally seen a reversal in the negative trend for the USDC market cap as it started growing again.
**If we zoom in, we have this. **
Here again we can see the overall downtrend for USDC in 2023 – 2024. At the moment the USDC supply is 27B.
Number of Daily Users
Here is the chart for the number of daily users making some on chain transactions with USDC.
Note that this chart is a bit outdated with the latest data from October 2023. The dune query is not available for this data at the moment.
We can notice that in 2023 the overall number of daily users has been around 20k. In the last months that are missing from this chart there is a general increase in the activity so the numbers are probably higher.
USDC Allocation on Different Chains
USDC is centrally issued but can live on multiple chains. Here is the chart.
Obviously, the big share of USDC remains on Ethereum with 87% share. Next is Solana with 5%. Solana share has been growing in the last few months, but it is still far from the ETH allocation. In the past Arbitrum and Polygon were leading before Solana, but now they have dropped in the rankings, especially Polygon.
USDC VS USDT
How is USDC doing against the number one stablecoin Tether? Tether was founded three years before USDC, so it has some head start. Is USDC managing to catch up?
Here is the chart.
At first these two were both growing on a similar pace in the bull market of 2020 and 2021. The in 2022 when the bear market kicked in the correlation between the two became almost negative, when one was growing, the other was falling.
Tether came out as the stronger from the bear market can consolidated its number one position even further. In the last few months for a first time since years both of the tokens increased in market cap, with Tether growing even faster, reaching new ATH and approaching the 100B market cap for the first time.
In relative terms % the chart looks like this:
The USDC market share against Tether has been growing up until the summer of 2022, when it reached a 45% of the USDT and USDC marketcap (56B to 66B), and it was looking that at some point USDC will flip Tether, but then it lost momentum and started losing market share. It dropped to 20% a few months back, and has slightly increased in the last months to 22% where it stands now.
