USD Coin (USDC) Statistics 2026: Volume, Market Share and Adoption

Circle reported $77.0 billion in USDC circulation at the end of Q1 2026, with on-chain transaction volume of $21.5 trillion, a 263% year-over-year jump, per the company’s May 11, 2026, earnings release. The figures that follow trace USD Coin’s full circulation, volume, market share, and adoption picture.

Key Takeaways

• USDC circulation reached $77.0 billion at the end of Q1 2026, a 28% year-over-year increase.
• USDC captured roughly 64% of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume year-to-date in 2026, reversing six years of USDT dominance.
• USDC settled 99.8% of all X402-Agentic AI-agent payments in Q1 2026, per Circle’s earnings call.
• Circle’s reserve fund is custodied at The Bank of New York Mellon and managed by BlackRock, with monthly attestations by Big Four auditor Deloitte covering 100% of reserves.
• USDC is natively supported on 34 blockchain networks as of May 13, 2026, with Ethereum and Solana holding the largest shares.
• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally granted national trust bank charters to Circle, Paxos, and three other nonbank financial firms in December 2025.
• Etherscan on-chain data shows 6,870,542 USDC holders on Ethereum as of May 16, 2026, with a mean per-holder balance of approximately $7,870.

Editor’s Choice

• USDC on-chain transaction volume reached $21.5 trillion in Q1 2026.
• USDC circulation hit $77.0 billion at quarter end, with $76.5 billion as of May 14, 2026.
• Mizuho measured USDC adjusted volume at about $2.2 trillion year-to-date vs USDT’s $1.3 trillion in 2026.
• USDC represented 63% of stablecoin transaction volumes in Q1 2026.
• Circle’s Q1 2026 total revenue and reserve income were $694 million, up 20% year-over-year.
• USDC on Ethereum alone holds an on-chain market cap of $54.06 billion across 6,870,542 holders as of May 16, 2026.
• Circle Payments Network reached $8.3 billion in annualized transaction volume at the end of Q1 2026.

Recent Developments

• On May 11, 2026, Circle reported Q1 2026 earnings with USDC in circulation growing 28% to $77.0 billion and Adjusted EBITDA growing 24% to $151 million.
• On March 13, 2026, Mizuho Securities raised its Circle price target from $100 to $120, citing USDC’s crossover above USDT in adjusted transaction volume.
• On December 16, 2025, Visa launched USDC settlement in the United States over the Solana blockchain, with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank as initial banking participants.
• In December 2025, the OCC conditionally granted national trust bank charters to Circle, Paxos, and three other nonbank financial firms, building on the July 2025 GENIUS Act enactment that established federal 1-to-1 reserve backing requirements and prohibited interest payments to stablecoin holders.
• On June 5, 2025, Circle Internet Group completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

USDC Circulation and Market Cap

• USDC ended Q1 2026 with $77.0 billion in circulation, a 28% year-over-year increase reported in Circle’s May 11, 2026, earnings release. The company’s own /usdc product page shows $76.5 billion in circulation as of May 14, 2026, reflecting routine mid-quarter redemption activity around the May 11 earnings print.
• Circle’s 2026 growth narrative rests on regulated-issuance demand. Adoption metrics like circulation and on-chain volume are typically more predictive of long-term viability than spot price movements, a pattern we’ve tracked across our coverage.

Source: Circle earnings release, Circle USDC product page, Brookings Institution.

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USDC Transaction Volume and On-chain Activity

• USDC on-chain transaction volume reached $21.5 trillion in Q1 2026, a 263% year-over-year jump per the company’s May 11, 2026, earnings release. That figure positions USDC as 63% of total stablecoin transaction volume in the quarter, which is the highest share Circle has ever reported.
• Mizuho Securities measured the same activity through its proprietary adjusted-volume methodology, which strips out wash and self-routed flow. USDC adjusted transaction volume reached about $2.2 trillion year-to-date in 2026 versus $1.3 trillion for USDT. Mizuho defines adjusted volume as transactions involving identified centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, or institutional participants, filtering for transfers that represent genuine value movement.
• The dispersion of USDC volume across decentralized exchanges, on-chain payment rails, and exchange settlement is the structural reason headline market-cap figures understate USDC’s actual transaction share.

Source: Circle earnings release, Mizuho Securities adjusted-volume note.

USDC vs USDT Market Share and Adjusted Volume

USDC captured roughly 64% of adjusted stablecoin activity in 2026, reversing the period from 2019 through 2025 when USDT dominated transaction flow, and USDC averaged about a30% share. Mizuho framed the reversal as the first since 2019 and raised its Circle price target from $100 to $120, citing institutional adoption in DeFi, payments, prediction markets, and agentic commerce.

By the numbers: Per Mizuho Securities, USDC adjusted transaction volume reached $2.2 trillion year-to-date in 2026 versus $1.3 trillion for USDT, a 64% share for USDC against USDT’s roughly 36%. The crossover marks the first such reversal since the 2019 launch period, with Mizuho citing DeFi, payments, prediction markets, and agentic commerce as the structural drivers behind the shift.

• The reversal mirrors a pattern across CoinLaw’s coverage of regulated dollar-token issuance: institutional flows follow regulatory clarity faster than retail flows follow brand familiarity.
• By contrast, the market-cap leaderboard still reads USDT-first, with USDT’s circulating supply remaining well above USDC’s. The two-track picture, USDT leading supply while USDC leads usage, is the structural shift institutional research desks now point to.

USDC Blockchain Distribution Across 34 Networks

• USDC is natively supported on 34 blockchain networks as of May 13, 2026, including Algorand, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Celo, Codex, EDGE Chain, Ethereum, Hedera, HyperEVM, Injective, Ink, Linea, Monad, Morph, NEAR, Noble, OP Mainnet, Pharos, Plume, Polkadot, Polygon PoS, Sei, Solana, Sonic, Starknet, Stellar, Sui, Unichain, World Chain, XDC, XRP Ledger, and ZKsync.
• Etherscan data shows $54.06 billion in USDC market cap on Ethereum alone as of May 16, 2026. That share is roughly 70% of the global supply, with Solana second and Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon trailing.
• Chain concentration is shifting toward Solana for institutional settlement flows, as Visa’s USDC settlement launch with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank marks the first major US bank-settlement flow routed through a non-Ethereum chain.

What blockchains support USDC?

USDC is natively supported on 34 blockchain networks as of May 13, 2026, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Stellar, and XRP Ledger. Circle handles minting and burning on each chain, and its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol moves USDC between chains without wrapped-token bridges.

USDC Holder Count and Wallet Distribution

• USDC on Ethereum has 6,870,542 holders as of May 16, 2026, per Etherscan on-chain data for contract address 0xa0b8…eb48. The simple mean balance is approximately $7,870 per holder, though the distribution is heavily right-skewed; a handful of exchange and DeFi protocol contracts hold balances in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, pulling the mean well above the median holder balance.

USDC Reserve Composition and Monthly Attestations

• USDC reserves are invested in the Circle Reserve Fund (USDXX), an SEC-registered 2a-7 government money market fund, with the portfolio custodied at The Bank of New York Mellon and managed by BlackRock. Circle publishes monthly reserve attestations by a Big Four accounting firm; Deloitte and Touche LLP is the independent auditor.
• Every USDC in circulation is backed 100% by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets and is redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. The 2a-7 government money market fund structure restricts holdings to short-dated US Treasury bills and overnight reverse repos, which is the same reserve discipline the GENIUS Act later codified as a federal requirement.

Source: Circle USDC product page, Circle Reserve Fund (USDXX) prospectus.

Is USDC safe to hold?

USDC reserves are invested in the Circle Reserve Fund (USDXX), an SEC-registered 2a-7 government money market fund custodied at The Bank of New York Mellon and managed by BlackRock, with monthly attestations. Counterparty exposure to commercial banks fell sharply after the SVB event, leaving smart-contract risk as the residual exposure since USDC remains a token on whichever chain a holder uses.

GENIUS Act and USDC’s Regulatory Position

• The GENIUS Act was enacted in July 2025 as the first comprehensive federal stablecoin framework in the United States. It requires stablecoins to have at least a 1-to-1 reserve backing and limits permissible reserves to US coins and currency, Federal Reserve deposits, Treasury bills with 93 days or less to maturity, uninsured bank deposits, and repurchase agreements. The Act also explicitly prohibits payment of interest to stablecoin holders, treating regulated stablecoins as transactional cash instruments rather than yield-bearing products.
• In December 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally granted national trust bank charters to Circle, Paxos, and three other nonbank financial firms, creating the first federal banking license path explicitly designed for stablecoin issuers. The total US stablecoin market reached nearly $280 billion at year-end 2025, up from about $25 billion in 2020.
• Circle’s reserve structure pre-dated the GENIUS Act’s text. Its regulatory profile (monthly attestations, BNY Mellon custody, BlackRock-managed reserve fund) already met the structural compliance bar by the time the Act passed, giving USDC an institutional moat that issuers without similar infrastructure must spend time and capital to close.

Source: Brookings Institution analysis, Circle GENIUS Act compliance page.

USDC Depeg History and the March 2023 SVB Event

• Circle was unable to access $3.3 billion of USDC reserves held as uninsured deposits at SVB, representing around 8% of total reserves at the time.
• USDC traded at 86 cents to the dollar at its trough, with primary-market redemptions suspended from March 10 through March 13, 2023.
• By March 15, Circle reported having redeemed $3.8 billion in USDC and minted $0.8 billion since March 13.
• Circle’s cash reserves in US financial institutions fell from $11.5 billion on March 6 to just $3.7 billion on March 31, 2023.

Why it matters: Per the Federal Reserve’s December 2025 FEDS Note, Circle’s $3.3 billion SVB exposure represented around 8% of total USDC reserves and drove USDC to an 86-cent trough. The post-crisis restructuring into the BlackRock-managed SEC 2a-7 reserve fund became the model the GENIUS Act codified federally.

Source: Federal Reserve FEDS Note

Circle Internet Group Financials

• Circle Internet Group reported Q1 2026 total revenue and reserve income of $694 million, up 20% year-over-year, on May 11, 2026. Net income from continuing operations was $55 million, down 15%, while Adjusted EBITDA was $151 million, up 24%. The net-income decline reflects post-IPO stock-based compensation that Circle has consistently flagged as a non-cash drag.
• Circle Payments Network (CPN) ended the quarter with $8.3 billion of annualized total payment volume on a trailing 30-day basis, up 17% quarter-over-quarter.
• The biggest Q1 2026 corporate development was the ARC token presale. Circle raised $222 million at a $3 billion fully diluted network valuation from a consortium that included a16z crypto, Apollo Funds, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Bullish, General Catalyst, Haun Ventures, Intercontinental Exchange, IDG Capital, Janus Henderson Investors, Marshall Wace, SBI Group, and Standard Chartered Ventures. Circle had previously completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on June 5, 2025.

Who owns and issues USDC?

Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) issues and governs USDC. Circle and Coinbase originally launched USDC in September 2018 through a joint venture called Centre, which they dissolved in August 2023 to give Circle full governance. Coinbase remains a principal distribution partner, and the conditional OCC trust bank charter will, once finalized, place USDC issuance under direct federal banking oversight.

Institutional Adoption: Visa Solana Settlement, Meta Payouts, Agentic Commerce

• Visa announced the launch of USDC settlement in the United States on December 16, 2025, with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank as initial banking participants settling in USDC over the Solana blockchain. Visa’s broader stablecoin settlement program reached more than $3.5 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume as of November 30, 2025, across Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and other regions.
• Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire highlighted two adoption milestones on the Q1 2026 earnings call. On Meta’s adoption: Meta, the world’s most preeminent social platform, began using USDC for creator payouts. On agentic commerce: USDC already has an enormous lead in Agentic payments today, with 99.8% of all X402-Agentic payments being settled using USDC.
• The agentic-commerce figure is the most forward-looking metric in the USDC adoption picture. As AI-agent payment standards (X402, Coinbase’s open agent commerce protocol stack) mature, the rails handling those flows will see compounding settlement volume, and they are forming around USDC, not USDT.

Source: Visa newsroom, Circle earnings call transcript, Kraken exchange listing data

Common Questions

USDC vs USDT: Which stablecoin is better?

The two tokens serve different priorities. USDT leads on circulating supply and emerging-market peer-to-peer flow. USDC leads on adjusted transaction volume at roughly 64% of adjusted stablecoin activity in 2026, on US regulatory alignment under the GENIUS Act, and on institutional payment rails. Pick USDC for regulated on-shore use; pick USDT for emerging-market liquidity.

Does USDC pay interest to holders?

No. Circle does not pay interest on USDC balances, and the GENIUS Act explicitly prohibits payment of interest by stablecoin issuers. Coinbase and other distribution partners offer separate rewards programs that pass through revenue share, and regulators continue to scrutinize whether the structure conflicts with the Act’s prohibition.

Conclusion

USDC ended Q1 2026 with $77.0 billion in circulation and $21.5 trillion in on-chain transaction volume, and captured roughly 64% of adjusted stablecoin activity, a transaction-flow reversal against USDT that Mizuho framed as the first since 2019. The combination of GENIUS Act regulatory alignment, OCC trust bank charter eligibility, BNY Mellon custody, and BlackRock-managed reserves gives Circle an institutional moat that the headline market-cap chart does not show.

The trajectory institutions are underwriting runs through agentic commerce and bank settlement rails. With USDC settling 99.8% of X402-Agentic payments, Visa routing US bank flows through Solana, and Meta paying creators in USDC, the next leg of growth depends less on retail crypto cycles than on whether AI-agent payment standards and bank-grade settlement infrastructure continue converging on a regulated dollar-token rail. Coverage across stablecoin market tracking will watch how that convergence shapes the back half of this year.