26 Sep 2022
USDT still hangs onto the top position among stablecoins
At the start of the year, many analysts expected USDC to overtake USDT's position as the largest stablecoin by market cap. This has not unfolded, and USDT is still by far the most dominant stablecoin.
USDC ended 2021 strongly and held onto its momentum in the first five months of 2022, increasing its market share from 27% at the start of the year to 35% in June. USDT has continued last year's trend of slowly but surely losing market share, starting the year at 49% and now sitting at 45%.Most of USDC's growth came during the algorithmic stablecoin UST's collapse in May, which led many previous UST holders to move the remainder of their funds into the more stable and regulated USDC. USDC is the most popular stablecoin for yield generation in DeFi applications, attracting a similar (but hopefully more conservative) user base than UST.USDC saw solid growth until June but has since stagnated. It now makes up 33% of the stablecoin market. Many analysts, including us, estimated at the start of 2022 that USDC would overtake USDT's position as the largest stablecoin by market cap in 2022, but that looks increasingly unlikely.While USDT lacked momentum at the start of the year, it looks like it has found it back recently. During the last 30 days, USDT's market cap has grown by 1%, while USDC's has declined by 5.5%.During the past month, the exchanges Binance and WazirX removed smaller stablecoin pairs, including USDC. These decisions were likely made to funnel liquidity into Binance's stablecoin BUSD. BUSD has seen tremendous growth in 2022, as it only made up 9% of the stablecoin market at the start of the year and 14% now.