USDC

USDC ended 2025 with about $75 billion in circulation, as coverage shifted from reserve-risk episodes toward payments, collateral and settlement use cases.

Who they are

USDC is Circle’s dollar-linked stablecoin, appearing in coverage as crypto-market infrastructure for trading, payments and collateral rather than as a conventional operating company. Its stories repeatedly connect it to Circle, Coinbase, Solana, Binance and rival stablecoins including Tether’s USDT and PayPal’s PYUSD.

The recent arc

Recent coverage has sustained a higher profile around expanding institutional and consumer uses. The most-covered recent quarter was 2025Q2, followed by six-story quarters in 2025Q4 and 2026Q1; Circle reported that USDC ended 2025 with roughly $75 billion in circulation, while reporting $18.3 trillion in 2025 stablecoin transaction volume.

The tension

Coverage centers on whether a regulated, widely integrated stablecoin can become mainstream financial plumbing while retaining the controls that distinguish it from more crypto-native alternatives. USDC competes for settlement and trading roles with USDT, PYUSD, USDG, RLUSD and others, while Drift Protocol’s planned switch from USDC to USDT and the court-ordered blacklist of Zama’s cUSDC contract show both competitive pressure and the consequences of issuer control.

Why it matters

If integrations by Mastercard, Meta, Coinbase and mortgage-market participants persist, USDC could move further from exchange liquidity into payment settlement, creator payouts and collateralized finance. That trajectory depends on whether users and platforms accept issuer intervention and regulatory constraints as a feature of a dependable dollar token rather than a limitation, particularly after prior coverage of its Silicon Valley Bank-related depeg.

Related: Circle · Coinbase · Solana · Tether · USDT · PayPal debuts PYUSD, a Paxos-issued stablecoin and fully backed by USD