Share this article
Total Stablecoin Supply Nearly Doubled in Q3, Adding Record $8B
“2020 seems to be the year of stablecoins,” said Tether's CTO.
By Zack Voell
Updated Mar 6, 2023, 3:09 p.m. Published Oct 1, 2020, 2:40 p.m.
Make us preferred on Google
Nearly $8 billion were added to the aggregate supply of stablecoins in the past three months, nearly doubling the industry’s supply of crypto dollars from $11.9B at the end of Q2 to just below $20B on Wednesday, according to Coin Metrics data.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
- “2020 seems to be the year of stablecoins,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether, the company behind the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, tether, in a private message to CoinDesk.
- Since this time last year, the supply of stablecoins has exploded by more than 1,200 percent.
- In May, the total stablecoin supply passed $10 billion for the first time, as CoinDesk reported, closing Q2 just below $12 billion. Aggregate supply closed Q3 at $19.87 billion, nearly breaking above $20 billion on Sunday, according to data from Coin Metrics.
- In addition to supply growth, Q3 saw stablecoins grow across multiple blockchains as Tether added support for both OmiseGo and Solana protocols. USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, expanded to the Algorand network, as CoinDesk reported.
- USDC also joined tether as the only stablecoins with market capitalizations greater than $1 billion after adding $1.5 billion since the end of June.
- According to Ardoino, the primary drivers of growth in the past quarter were the “explosion of decentralized finance (DeFi)” and a growing number of hedge funds and over-the-counter trading desks moving funds to tether for “faster arbitrage and reactions to market movements.”
- Whether this stablecoin growth will continue is hard to predict, Ardoino said. But as the utility of stablecoins like tether continues to expand, he expects overall growth to continue for at least the next few months.
More For You
Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale.
What to know:
Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token.
The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility.
More For You
Weaker dollar fails to spur bitcoin gains, but there's a reason for that
Gold and other hard assets are rallying on dollar weakness, but bitcoin is lagging as markets continue to treat it as a liquidity-sensitive risk asset.
What to know:
- Bitcoin has, unusually, not rallied alongside the slide in the U.S. dollar.
- JPMorgan strategists say the dollar’s weakness is being driven by short-term flows and sentiment, not changes in growth or monetary policy expectations, and they expect the currency to stabilize as the U.S. economy strengthens.
- Because markets do not view the current dollar decline as a lasting macro shift, bitcoin is trading more like a liquidity-sensitive risk asset than a reliable dollar hedge, leaving gold and emerging markets as the preferred beneficiaries of dollar diversification.
Top Stories
