CEO and cofounder of London-based Circle, Jeremy Allaire, has taken to Twitter to announce that the amount of the second most popular stablecoin, USDC, issued by his company and Coinbase exchange via Centre Consortium, has exceeded an astounding 3.3 billion coins.
USDC has added more than 300 million USDC (USD Coin) in less than a week.
300 million USDC issued in six days
On Dec. 9, Circle boasted that the circulating supply of USDC had exceeded the 3 billion milestone, thus showing a more than 500 percent rise since the start of 2020.
With the circulating supply standing at over 3 billion USDC a week ago, the current growth by 300 million coins signifies a weekly 10 percent rise.
The stablecoin was first launched in 2018 and, since then, it has provided support to over $230 billion on-chain transfers.
The article published by the Centre Consortium on Medium explained this major growth with the increasing demand for USDC as a reliable and transparent stablecoin backed by the U.S. dollar.
Factors behind growing demand for USDC
The author of the article explained the surging demand for USDC with several reasons. They believe the growth was largely due to the fact that financial institutions and companies are switching to USD-pegged stablecoins while making payments and treasury operations.
It is the low cost and high speed of transactions and instant settlement that attracts them. The demand for USDC is showing particularly large growth in emerging countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Besides, dollar-backed stablecoins such as USDC and USDT are widely used by crypto market participants for trading and hedging risks.
DeFi is another reason for the abovementioned growth in the circulating USDC supply. Many of these lending and borrowing apps leverage USDC and, recently, the amount of crypto locked in them, including USDC, has exceeded $14 billion.
USDC versus USDT
At press time, USDC is ranked 12th on the CoinMarketCap service, with a market capitalization of $3,270,931,991.
Its rival, Tether (USDT), remains a more popular stablecoin with its fourth spot on the Top 10 crypto scale and a market capitalization totaling $19,768,602,129.
Vladislav Sopov