Circle’s USDC moved roughly $18.3 trillion in transfer volume across 2025, edging past Tether’s USDT at about $13.2 trillion and helping push total stablecoin transfers to an estimated $33 trillion for the year, up 72% year-on-year. That velocity shift happened even while USDT kept the larger market cap (about $186.6 billion versus USDC’s $75.12 billion), so the story is more about how stablecoins were used than how big they were.
What changed was the routing. A mix of chain-level mechanics, regulatory positioning, and one outsized Solana-driven flow helped USDC outrun USDT on transfers—without implying USDT lost its role as the dominant liquidity stockpile.
Why Solana amplified USDC’s velocity
Solana’s throughput and low fees made it a high-turnover settlement rail for DeFi, and USDC became the dominant unit of account on that chain, exceeding 70% of Solana’s stablecoin supply. During Q1 2025, Solana’s total stablecoin supply rose from $5.2 billion to $11.7 billion (a 125% increase), with USDC inflows cited as the key driver.
That concentration matters because it compounds activity: the same USDC balances can cycle rapidly through trading, lending, and automated market-making, which inflates transfer totals even if the outstanding market cap doesn’t rise proportionally. In practice, this is what “velocity” looks like—deep pools, frequent settlement, and repeated reuse of the same liquidity.
Institutional routing and transparency premium
Separately, Circle’s focus on transparent reserve reporting and regular attestations aligned with institutional requirements, and that alignment helped steer settlement and treasury flows toward USDC. JPMorgan analysts highlighted that “transparent reserve management and regular audits are key differentiators,” reinforcing why regulated counterparties may prioritize governance signals alongside liquidity.
Then came the catalytic moment: the January 2025 TRUMP memecoin launch on Solana pushed short-term demand through USDC, because the primary liquidity pool on Meteora paired with USDC rather than USDT. Traders chasing the memecoin first had to acquire USDC, and that mechanical step translated into a burst of transactional demand that rippled through Solana’s DeFi plumbing.
None of this negates USDT’s footprint. USDT still dominated by market capitalization and retained broad utility for cross-exchange and cross-border settlement, so 2025 reads as a reweighting of transactional velocity and network composition—not a clean handoff in overall liquidity leadership.
For product and compliance teams, the takeaway is operational: network choice and reserve transparency can directly shape institutional access and on-chain throughput, which then shows up in transfer totals. The next practical question is whether Solana-linked integrations and compliance-driven preference sustain USDC’s elevated velocity into future reporting periods, or whether similar dynamics emerge on other chains.