USD Coin [USDC] is the second-largest stablecoin that is pegged to the U.S. dollar at a 1:1 ratio. The stablecoin was launched in September 2018 by Centre, a joint venture that included Circle and Coinbase.
Circle remains the primary issuer of the USDC stablecoin and was co-founded by Jeremy Allaire, the current CEO, and Sean Neville. The USDC whitepaper board included other venture investors like Jim Breyer, Quan Zhou, and David Orfao. The US Secretary of the Treasury recruited Independent Director Raj Date to oversee the regulatory agency for consumer protection.
The goal was to make a digital currency that was open, regulated, and trustworthy. It combined the stability of fiat with the speed of blockchain technology while adhering to French law, which was the home member state. The team was also advancing financial inclusion across the globe, with the Circle Foundation actualizing it through grants to the United Nations.
The Circle team promised to use a full-reserve model.
This means that every USDC in circulation is backed by an equal amount of USD-denominated assets held in separate accounts. The monthly independent attestations backed this idea for accountability.
For context, USDC was the sixth-highest-capped cryptocurrency with a total supply of 79.47 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. This cap accounted for more than a quarter of the total stablecoin supply in the market. The USDC reserve fund was managed by BlackRock, with Deloitte coming in as the auditor for their reporting. Other institutional investors were Fidelity, Coinbase, Marshall Wace, Fin Capital, Goldman Sachs, and Visa/Mastercard, among others.
According to Circle’s X profile, the protocol relied on USDC, Arc, and the Circle Payments Network. They also made waves by launching their crypto stock, CRCL, through an IPO that raised a substantial $1.1 billion. On the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), CRCL’s market cap hovered around $32 billion. Circle was operating on four major product lines, that is, Circle Pay, Circle Trade, Circle Invest, and Poloniex.
Additional data from DeFiLlama revealed that the protocol generated $2.42 billion in annualized revenue, with a monthly bridged volume of $15.56 billion. The revenue and fees have been averaging $40 million per day since the start of 2025, as per Token Terminal. The number of asset holders has been making new peaks since 2023, sitting at 41.2 million at press time. The USDC wallets were holding a record of 32.7 billion. Moreover, USDC’s all-time transfer volume was in the $70 trillion range, while its transfer count was around 100 million.
Despite the stablecoin being key in the crypto ecosystem, it works mostly on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks. The PoS addresses the environmental rhetoric as it uses extremely low energy. The protocol was rolled out on Ethereum, but to facilitate interoperability across different chains, Circle deployed the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP). Hence, the growth now includes more than 30 blockchains, such as Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum One, BNB Smart Chain, Sui Network, and Aptos, among others. With CCTP, USDC could be transferred across these chains through a burn and mint mechanism. However, in February 2024, Circle discontinued USDC on the TRON blockchain following a risk management review.
According to data from DeFiLlama, 66.67% of the total supply was minted on Ethereum, which was equivalent to $52.94 billion. Solana secured the second spot, representing roughly 10.31%, or $8.19 billion. The Hyperliquid L1 and Base chains each received over 10%, splitting the total evenly. This cross-chain accessibility facilitated collaboration between decentralized finance [DeFi] and centralized finance [CeFi] platforms.
USDC’s strategy of prioritizing regulatory compliance has fueled its adoption, particularly following the introduction of the MiCA-compliant framework in Europe. The MiCA USDC whitepaper formally designates it as an Electronic Money Token (EMT), having been published on the 31st of May, 2024, and revised on the 12th of September, 2024.
For instance, USDC was trading on major exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Kraken, among others, as well as expanding into prediction markets like Polymarket. In fact, it was the main asset traded on Polymarket after Circle partnered to enable stablecoin settlements for faster execution.
Therefore, Circle became the first major stablecoin issuer to comply with the EU MiCA regulation fully. With that in mind, the adoption of its sister token, EURC, increased across European participants.
Circle’s Chief Strategy Officer was invited to a hearing on stablecoin regulation by the UK House of Lords despite their MiCA compliance. The UK was borrowing from MiCA and the GENIUS Act to streamline stablecoin operations in the UK. The stablecoin also launched its lending program in Japan through SBI VC Trade under fixed-term contracts on the 19th of March, 2026. Each application was capped at 5,000 USDC per offering. However, there was still a risk of losing funds if SBI VC Trade became insolvent.
Another major development happening on USDC was the growth of Agentic Commerce, as reported in the USDC OpenClaw Hackathon. With that integration, AI agents could spend USDC autonomously, thus executing payments on-chain. They were still calling for more agents to be deployed on the protocol after introducing Circle’s open-source AI skills. In less than a year, AI agents had made more than $140 million from each other, and 98.6% of these transactions were settled in USDC. The stablecoin was ahead of its competitor, USDT, on this front, with these transactions averaging $0.31.
Lastly, with USDC accounting for more than 25% of the total stablecoin supply, it was more than all other USD-pegged stablecoins, excluding USDT. These stablecoins were USDS, USDe, DAI, USD1, PYUSD, BUIDL, USYC, USDG, and others whose dominance followed each other, respectively.
