what's usdc?
Circle is a financial technology company that issues USDC, the world's largest regulated stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, providing stability and trust in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Founded in 2013, Circle focuses on building open infrastructure for global payments, commerce, and financial applications using digital currencies and blockchains. Key features include the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) for seamless USDC transfers across multiple blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and others, as well as Circle Mint for institutional onramps and treasury management. USDC is fully reserved with assets like US dollars and short-term government securities, with monthly attestations for transparency. Circle also powers innovations like Circle Gateway for unified cross-chain USDC balances and supports real-world applications in trade finance, DeFi, and payments. As of October 2025, USDC has over $75 billion in circulation, underscoring Circle's role in bridging traditional finance and crypto.
USDC gains European regulatory conversion, L1 integration with CCTP, and Circle defends property rights.
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Listed for conversion via Circle's Mint platform at ClearBank Europe, the first Dutch MiCA-licensed credit institution to offer USDC conversion.
Vault creation gas fee raised from 100 USDC to 10K USDC on Hyperliquid mainnet.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire defended the decision not to freeze USDC linked to the $285M Drift hack, citing lack of legal authority and concerns over property rights.
Added as a new liquidity pool pairing with 0G on 0G Labs via JAINE's Be Liquid V2, running for 90 days.
Integrated natively with Pharos Network, an EVM L1 blockchain launching mainnet in Q2 2026, including CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) support.
Circle minted approximately 250 million USDC on Solana in the 24 hours ending April 14, 2026.
Minted 2.25 billion USDC on Solana during the week ending April 13, 2026.
Allowed 250M of stolen USDC to cross the native bridge during office hours in March 2026.
Experienced a 1,097% week-over-week increase in whale transactions ($100K or more) on its network.
Minted 550 million USDC on Solana within a 12-hour period.
Reached 82% utilization in USDC lending on Chainflip.
Minted approximately 500 million USDC on Solana within a 24-hour period ending on 2026-04-07.
Circle launched native USDC and CCTP V2 on Starknet for regulated stablecoin settlements in 2025.
2.5M USDC was bridged from Solana to Ethereum via Circle CCTP by the DriftProtocol exploiter, then swapped for 1,196 ETH on April 2, 2026.
A whale address deposited 52.46 million USDC to Binance, Bybit, and Deribit exchanges, then withdrew 25,000 ETH (valued at $53.28 million) within the most recent hour.
Settles 98.7% of all agent-to-agent payment volume as of March 31, 2026.
Issued $2.24 billion USDC in the rolling 7-day period ending March 31, 2026.
Integrated with Bidali gift cards to enable autonomous AI agent Beppe to purchase food using USDC.
Minted 3 billion USDC on Solana over 4 days, averaging $750M daily, ending April 3, 2026.
Integrated with Ramp Stablecoin Accounts feature for holding, earning rewards, and making payments.
Transfers to BNB Chain remain gas-free and fee-free through a 0 Fee Carnival promotion continuing through April 2026.
Minted $2.5 billion in new supply over the past week ending March 30, 2026.
Reached a circulating supply of 77,570,000,000 USDC.
Meteora is offering five $500 USDC bounties as prizes for a social media challenge promoting their new dynamic terminal feature.
Serves as the reward currency in a $10,000 prize pool for top Binance Pay spenders on Travala, running until April 2, 2026.
Added support for payments on Solana via Machine Payments Protocol and QuickNode MPP.
Enabled as payment method for AI agent chess and poker matches on Alpha Arena via x402.
Binance allocated 500,000 USDC as rewards for the March Challenge incentive program involving referral and trading tasks.
Integrated into a lending vault launched by Marinade Finance in collaboration with Rockaway and Kamino on Solana.
Moves 4x more volume than USDT, despite USDT's 2.5x larger market cap, and is predicted to surpass USDT in TVL.
Projected to reach $1 trillion in issuance by 2030.
Circle's contract with Coinbase for user acquisition is set to be re-negotiated in August 2026.
Integrated as the cashback reward token in Jupiter Global's new cashback and referral program, where users earn USDC instantly on purchases with rates starting at 4% and increasing to 10% based on referrals.
Launched Fannie Mae-backed crypto mortgages with Coinbase and Better Home & Finance, accepting USDC and BTC collateral for down payments via OpenGDP, enabling tax-efficient use.
Added as a quote asset in the new XAUt/USDC trading pair on Binance, scheduled to launch on 2026-03-26 at 13:30 UTC.
Reached approximately $80 billion in TVL and $11.9 trillion in transaction volume.
Used as the payout currency for Swari Agra digital passes claim on Avalanche, with principal and APR (30% to 250% based on rarity) distributed in USDC.
Holds 88% market share of IBC volume.
Is featured as one of the supported assets in Lazy Summer vaults launched on Utila, alongside USDT and EURC, with coverage on Base and Ethereum networks.
Issued $1.5 billion USDC in the rolling 7-day period ending 2026-03-25.
Minted 10 billion USDC over 30-day period ending April 7, 2026.
Reaches over $1 billion in market cap on HyperEVM chain.
Serves as the payment currency for the LAMB token sale on Fjord Foundry, with a 2,760 USDC qualification amount for 276CLUB membership tier.
Allocated $90,000 in USDC rewards for the Sei Nitro incentive program involving lending on YeiFinance.
Circle and edgeX launched a USDC deposit program offering 10% APY with a $30 million capacity limit.
Rolling out with Sasai Fintech in Africa.
CLARITY Act limits USDC yield to activity-based rewards; Circle shares fell over 18% on March 24, 2026.
Froze $109 million across 372 wallets using a blacklist function, tied to a sealed NY civil case in March 2026.
Reached $37.75M TVL in the Goldfinch RWA lending pool on Ethereum with 10.01% APY.
New trading pairs ETHUSDC and BTCUSDC are available on Boros with maturity date April 26, 2026 across Huobi, OKX, and Binance exchanges.
New trading pair HYPERUSDC is available on Boros with maturity date April 26, 2026 on Huobi and Bybit exchanges.
1.2M USDC deployed in collaboration with OctantApp to fund ecosystem growth using their funding distribution model.
Bybit optimized fee structures and enhanced liquidity for USDC spot and futures trading pairs starting on March 23, 2026.
Coinbase rolled out stock perpetual futures for international users, offering USDC-settled leveraged exposure to Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon at up to 10x on single stocks and 20x on ETF products.
Exploited Resolv's USR stablecoin contract March 22, 2026, minting 80M unbacked USR against $200K USDC collateral, depegging USR to $0.025 on Curve and extracting $25M from USR/USDC liquidity pool. Morpho's Public Allocator drained $6.2M USDC from curator vaults due to a hardcoded oracle, exacerbated by Gauntlet's bots supplying USDC into the broken market. Fluid faces $11.2M bad debt on Ethereum mainnet.
Supply increased by $4.5 billion year-to-date in 2026, leading all stablecoins in net flows.
Daily transactions reached all-time highs.
Can be used to pay transaction fees on Polkadot (swapped for DOT behind the scenes) alongside USDT and other approved assets
Launches USDCx on Movement via Circle xReserve, backed 1:1 by USDC, with bridgeless access across 30+ chains on 2026-03-25.
Featured as one of three assets in a Balancer LP pool on Monad that now supports collateral use via Euler lending integration.
Whale transactions ($100K or more) on BNB Chain increased 57% week-over-week.
Market cap increased by approximately 30% during Circle's period as a public company.
Issued $250M USDC on Solana on 2026-03-25, with total issuance reaching $750M across all chains in the past 24 hours.
Was withdrawn from Venus Protocol during an exploit via THE token manipulation, with 1.58M USDC among the reported losses totaling over $3.7M.
Has 335,000 USDC in TVL on Privacy Pools protocol.
Minted approximately 2.50 billion USDC on Solana over a 7-day period ending around March 16, 2026.
Issued $8.82 billion USDC in the rolling 7-day period ending approximately 2026-03-12 21:46:56 UTC.
Integrated into Lido's first stablecoin vault, EarnUSD, supporting USDT/USDC, attracting $250M in deposits since September 2025.
Minted approximately 500 million USDC on Solana within a 24-hour period ending on 2026-03-12.
Circle minted $1 billion USDC on Solana in 9 hours on December 31, 2025.
Cash App rolled out Solana USDC transfers in January 2026.
Reached approximately $710.4M market cap on Polygon for native USDC as of 2026-03-11.
Integrated with Infini's global collection accounts service where merchants' fiat currency deposits are automatically converted to USDC, with 0.3%-0.5% conversion rates during closed beta.
Minted approximately 750 million USDC on Solana in a 6-hour period ending on March 10, 2026.
Reached an all-time high of 15.7 million monthly senders across all chains.
Has 4.2 million monthly senders on Solana, making it the most widely used chain for USDC.
Serves as the payment currency for non-tokenized agents in Virtuals Protocol's Epoch 4 Revenue Incentives program, where agents earn USDC upfront before tokenization.
Minted $250M USDC on Solana on March 13, 2026, bringing total March 2026 mints to $3B.
Ranked as the third most donated digital asset in 2025 according to The Giving Block's Annual Report on Crypto Philanthropy.
Launched Circle Skills, an open-source AI toolkit for AI agents and developers using USDC, EURC, Arc for payments, cross-chain transfers, wallets, and smart contracts in platforms like Cursor and Claude Code; also launched Nanopayments on testnet for $0.000001 USDC payments with zero gas fees.
Issued $250 million USDC on Solana and $90 million USDC on Ethereum on February 26, 2026.
Issued net $9.51 billion USDC on Solana and negative $452 million on Ethereum over the rolling 30-day period ending February 26, 2026.
Experienced net redemption of $452 million USDC on Ethereum over the rolling 30-day period ending February 26, 2026.
Integrated as the payment method for Purch, an agentic shopping concierge on MoltBook that enables AI agents to place Amazon orders with onchain settlement on Solana.
CCTP transfer volume increased approximately 200% year-over-year.
Powers payroll functionality in the Zebec SuperApp desktop version, which launched on February 25, 2026.
Minted $600 million this week, pushing total supply past $75.3 billion (Q4 2025) and market cap over $78 billion.
Minted over $20 billion worth of USDC on Solana since the beginning of 2026.
The SEC's Division of Trading and Markets issued guidance in February 2026 reducing the regulatory capital haircut for USDC and other qualifying payment stablecoins from 100% to 2% under Exchange Act Rule 15c3-1 for broker-dealers, allowing firms to count 98% of USDC's market value toward net capital requirements.
Supported as one of the vault assets in Summer Finance's upcoming DAO Managed Vaults on Mainnet and Base, launching the week of 2026-02-24.
Became available as a borrowable asset (up to $100k) on Coinbase's crypto-backed loan platform, supporting collateral in XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC.
integrated into Vultisig's Smart Contract Accounts alongside Circle's infrastructure, enabling native USDC tooling within a seedless MPC/TSS vault for self-custody digital dollar operations
Lighter signed a revenue-sharing agreement with Circle for $920 million in USDC deposited on its platform.
Integrated into Coinbase's Agentic Wallets infrastructure on Base network, enabling AI agents to hold USDC and execute transactions via the x402 protocol.
Integrated with ZeroHash on Monad network to enable stablecoin payments on that platform.
Integrated into Stripe's machine and AI agent payments preview alongside X.402, demonstrated by a robot dog autonomously completing a payment transaction to recharge itself, the first autonomous economic loop by a robot.
Minted $250 million USDC on Solana on February 16, 2026.
Minted 750 million USDC in a one-hour period on February 2, 2026.
Hurupay platform automatically converts received fiat payments to USDC and EURC stablecoins for users.
Hurupay has processed over $37 million in total transaction volume using USDC.