In the cryptosphere, the market for stablecoins (mostly backed by the US dollar) is doing well, with continued growth in their issuance. Circle and Coinbase’s USDC, however, just got off to an even more exceptional start than usual when it was initially launched on the Tron (TRX) blockchain.
USDC: a strong challenger to USDT
Except for Tether’s recent (and rather strange) USDT issuance halt, the capitalization of the major US dollar stablecoins has been growing steadily over the past few months, in an increasingly exponential fashion.
The USDC, which is the second largest stablecoin in terms of total capitalization, has particularly benefited from these to take more and more market share, especially from the USDT.
According to the chart below, Tether’s USDT share has fallen below 60% dominance for the first time since its inception, standing at precisely 59.6% as of today.
Conversely, the later-launched USDC (in September 2018 on Ethereum) has steadily risen, approaching a quarter of the total dollar stablecoin market, with a dominance of 22.9% at the time of writing.
100 million USDC added on Tron in less than 48 hours
In recent evidence that the success of Circle’s stablecoin offering is unabated, USDC has been in high demand following its official launch on the Tron blockchain.
After Circle announced this July 1, 2021 – notably on Twitter – the compatibility of its stablecoin on the network co-founded by Justin Sun, more than 100 million USDC were credited to Tron user accounts. At this point, the total amount has even exceeded 110 million dollar equivalents.
The total capitalization of USDC, on all blockchains combined, is now more than $25.5 billion, making it the eighth most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
It should be remembered that barely a month ago, Circle had managed to raise a total of $440 million in funding, including from Fidelity, FTX and Grayscale Investments. In spite of this mega-bank’s outspoken criticism of the crypto industry, Circle has long been backed by Goldman Sachs, which must have been a big help in breaking through.