Circle mints USDC on the Solana blockchain, closing the gap with Tether’s USDT and boosting its market cap by $5 billion last week.
To catch close to Tether’s USDT, USDC issuer Circle has started minting much of its stablecoin. Due to strong demand after introducing the TRUMP meme coin, the stablecoin company has made more than $5 billion USDC on the Solana network in just one week.
This indicates that Circle is expanding its market share and that, by complying with MiCA, it will likely be able to reduce Tether’s market capitalization.
Circle USDC Stablecoin Expands Its Market Reach
Since early 2025, the stablecoin company has been minting USDC in droves. Consequently, the USDC market capitalization has increased by 8%, gaining $8 billion and surpassing $52 billion. According to on-chain data, a significant portion of this minting took place last week.
According to on-chain data, the USDC market cap increased by $5 billion in just one week. According to blockchain analytics company Arkham, Circle made $250 million USDC on the Solana blockchain today. This most recent issuance highlights the stablecoin issuer’s increasing engagement on the network, as it adds to the 5 billion USDC in total that has been minted on Solana since 2025.
Given the rising demand for USDC in DeFi (decentralized finance) and other applications, the move demonstrates Circle’s ongoing dedication to broadening its footprint on Solana. Interestingly, the spike in USDC minting occurred just after the TRUMP meme coin was introduced, which caused a huge market frenzy.
Bridging the Gap With Tether USDT
Circle has been getting closer to its main competitor, Tether, the company that issues the USDT stablecoin, with a significant number of USDT mints in the first month of 2025. Tether’s market capitalization has remained unchanged at $139.27 billion, whereas Circle’s increased in January of this year.
With about $52.1 billion in reserve, the total amount of USDC in circulation has reached 51.9 billion. These reserves comprise $46.1 billion under management in the Circle Reserve Fund and $6.1 billion in cash.
The spike coincides with several adoption-boosting initiatives being carried out by the USDC stablecoin issuer, including its recent purchase of Hashnote, a prominent issuer of tokenized physical assets.
However, Circle’s USDC remains less than half as large as Tether’s USDT. Additionally, the market value of the USDC stablecoin has doubled in the past year, and the USDT stablecoin has seen a significant 50% increase in market value, reaching $140 billion.
Circle Introduces Paymaster to Increase USDC Adoption
“Paymaster,” a new feature that allows users to settle transaction fees on Arbitrum and Base using USDC rather than ether (ETH), was introduced by Circle, the issuer of the $48 billion USDC stablecoin.
According to a blog post by the company, Paymaster handles USDC payments and transforms them into native tokens to pay fees to blockchain validators.
The service charges 10% of the gas price for every transaction and is planned to expand to Ethereum, Polygon POS, and Solana. However, this charge will be removed until June 30 to encourage early adoption.
