Over 4.4 Billion Added in Total Stablecoin Supply in the First Week of December

In the last 15 days, the supply of USDC has surged by about $6.5 billion as its market cap reaches $40.8 billion.

In less than three days, during which the crypto market experienced a sell-off, $1.9 billion was added to USDC’s market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

“There is a sentiment of uncertainty across all markets as we approach the end of the year,” said Chris Kline, COO, and co-founder of Bitcoin IRA. “This is a healthy pullback as all markets look to readjust to the new Fed policies, inflation, and Covid concerns. Inflation is not going away anytime soon, and investors are taking note of that, looking to hedge with tools like crypto.”

Since 2020, the rapidly-growing stablecoin has surged 100x, as celebrated by Jeremy Allaire, co-founder & CEO of Circle, which along with public company Coinbase, formed the consortium Center to launch USDC.

The majority of USDC supply, 88.4%, is issued on Ethereum blockchain, and 9.66% is on Solana blockchain. The rest is spread across Algorand, Tron, Stellar, and Hedera.

When it comes to the market leader, Tether (USDT), it added about $4.25 billion to its market cap in the last ten days to now surpass $77 billion. Since Saturday, USDT’s market cap has grown by about $2 billion.

USDT, which a year back was dominating the stablecoin space by accounting for 86.35% of its market share, has only been declining since June 2020 to now be at 54.5%. At the same time, USDC’s market share grew by 20.25% to 28.25%.

The majority of Tether’s supply, 50.38%, is currently issued on Tron blockchain, followed by Ethereum, which accounts for 48.9%. As for the remaining USDT supply, it is on Solana, Omni, EOS, Liquid, Algorand, Avalanche, and SLP.

The leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s stablecoin BUSD has also captured USDT’s lost market share to now account for 9.14%, up from 1.33% in June last year.

On Nov. 27, BUSD’s market cap was around $12.8 billion, which rose to $13.8 billion on Dec. 4, only to slide down to $13.36 billion today.

This year, stablecoins have simply exploded in popularity and usage as their combined market cap now stands above $146 billion compared to just $29 bln at the beginning of this year. This represents over a 5x growth in less than a year. In March 2020, their total market cap was less than $6 billion.

Meanwhile, the total stablecoin supply jumped by 4.43 billion in just the first six days of December.