Stablecoin King? Circle: USDC issuance has reached half of USDT, Defi explosion is the key

Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of Circle, the issuer of the stablecoin USDC, announced on Twitter on November 23 that USDC's share of the market leader USDT has exceeded 50%. As USDT still has a big lead in market circulation and trading volume, it is clear that the growth of USDC may come from demand outside of centralized exchanges.

Only 20% at the beginning of the year, growth may come from DeFi

Allaire showed an internal statistical chart on Twitter, and the results showed that the issuance of USDC has successfully reached half of USDT in recent days. Compared with the breakthrough of 20% in January, it can be said that there has been considerable progress: Take a look at this annual share change chart, USDC has exceeded 50% of USDT.

According to Coinmarketcap data, the current total supply of USDT is about 76.357 billion US dollars, and USDC is 36.722 billion US dollars, which is indeed a 50% performance. However, in terms of 24-hour trading volume, USDT still leads USDC by a large margin with 85.241 billion US dollars to 4.926 billion US dollars, which shows that the growth momentum of USDC may come from decentralized exchanges, DeFi protocols and other fields.

Circle actively complies with regulations and seizes Tether's territory

Since 2013, Circle has been engaged in wallet payment, OTC, cryptocurrency exchange, stablecoin and other businesses. During the bear market, the company's valuation fell by 75% at one point, and it was forced to lay off a large number of employees and sell core assets. Finally, it finally found stablecoin as its main product.

Despite being accused of false advertising and only having 61% U.S. dollar reserve support, USDC's issuer Circle has been seeking IPO and compliance opportunities, including working with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). It also immediately made corrections after the reserve incident and announced that it would complete the conversion by September this year, using cash and short-term U.S. Treasury bonds as USDC reserves.

Circle is also actively planning to become a federally chartered national commercial bank in the United States, expressing its willingness to operate under the supervision of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Agency, and is more willing to issue third-party certification on the adequacy of USDC reserves every month.

In contrast, Tether was recently exposed by the crypto lending platform Celsius at the end of October for misappropriating reserve funds for lending. Bloomberg also questioned whether it had never operated in the Wall Street market, where its U.S. Treasury reserves came from, and the whereabouts of its senior executives and unclear regulatory authority.

Even though Tether fought back, Hindenburg Research, a financial research firm based in New York, announced the launch of a Tether bounty program, offering US$1 million to anyone who can provide internal information about Tether's stablecoin that has never been made public.