USDC has been one of the stablecoins, (a dollar pegged tokens), 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 it is US based and in compliance with all the regulations, unlike Tether that is an offshore company and not 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 for one weekend. Before this event, USDC was considered by most the safest stablecoin to park your dollars. Since the incident in the last years there seems to be some positive numbers again.
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 market-cap data is collected from CoinGecko, while the chain allocation snapshot comes from usdc.cool.
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, updated through August 23, 2026.
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 was more than one billion USDC issued per day, while other days recorded equally large burns. We can notice the sharp burns that happened in March and April 2023 when the depegging event took place. The latest months are mixed again, with several negative periods followed by a recovery during August.
Monthly USDC Printed
Here is the monthly chart for better visibility, with completed months through July 2026.
We can see that up to 2022 there was generally more USDC printed each month, and then the trend shifted with many negative months. A massive negative bar appeared in March 2023, when almost 10B USDC was taken out of circulation during the depegging event.
In 2025 there was a large positive spike in January. January 2026 then removed close to 6B, followed by positive February and March. The trend turned negative again from May through July, with -1.7B in July 2026.
USDC Supply
The chart for the USDC supply through August 23, 2026 looks like this.
Prior to 2020, the market cap of USDC was negligible, with under 1B in supply. Then there was a huge increase in 2021, when almost 40B USDC was added to the supply.
The first major peak for the USDC market cap was in June 2022, with around 55B. At that time Tether was experiencing FUD and a lot of stablecoin liquidity moved toward USDC. Since the summer of 2022 the supply of USDC went down, including a massive drop during the March 2023 depegging event. From the beginning of 2024 the USDC market cap started growing again. It reached a new ATH of almost 79.6B in March 2026, and then pulled back, ending August 23 at 73.5B.
If we zoom in on the period from 2024 through 2026, we have this.
The zoomed chart shows the steady growth at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, the pullback at the end of 2025, and the sharp rise toward the March 2026 ATH before the latest correction.
USDC Allocation on Different Chains
USDC is centrally issued but can live on multiple chains. This allocation snapshot was retrieved from usdc.cool on August 24, 2026.
The largest share of USDC remains on Ethereum with around 68%, or 50.1B. Solana is in second place with 7.1B, followed by HyperEVM with 6.4B. Base holds 4.3B and Arbitrum 2.6B, while the remaining chains account for 3.2B.
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 through August 23, 2026.
At first these two were both growing at a similar pace in the bull market of 2020 and 2021. In 2022, when the bear market started, the correlation became almost negative: when one was growing, the other was often falling. Tether came out stronger from the bear market and consolidated its number one position even further. Both tokens returned to growth during the latest cycle, but Tether remains clearly ahead. As of August 23, Tether has 183.2B in market cap, compared with 73.5B for USDC.
In relative percentage terms the chart looks like this:
The USDC market share against Tether grew until the summer of 2022, when it reached around 45% of their combined market cap. It then lost momentum and dropped close to 20% at the end of 2023.
During 2024 the USDC share hovered slightly above 20% and gained momentum toward the end of the year. It has since remained near 30%, ending the latest period at around 28.6% of the combined USDC and USDT market cap.
All the best @dalz
