Stablecoins have become an essential part of the crypto industry. The crypto dollars have been useful for people outside of US, where their local currency is not performing at best. More people and businesses are starting to accept and work with crypto dollars. We are witnessing a whole new sector emerging in the crypto industry, and there seems to be a lot of interest from a lot of players to enter the game. Paypal has been one of the new brands entering the in the market with its pyUSD in 2024. There is even an official stablecoin act now with the US government, that should boost the sector even more.
How is the dominant and the incumbent in the industry doing in the last period. Let’s take a look!
Tether started its journey back in 2015 and allegedly it was founded by the Bitfinex exchange.
A lot can be said about Tether, a history with controversy, mainly around the fractional dollar reserves, or is every USDT backed by equal amounts held in banks accounts. There have been court cases etc, but up until now Tether has been able to manage the situation and keep growing.
One of the biggest wins for Tether is the way they handled 2022 and all the moments when projects collapsed, causing domino effects. On a few occasions there were massive amount of withdrawals initiated in a short amount of time. A massive 15B were withdrawn from Tether during the stablecoins crisis in May 2022, and later the collapse of FTX as well. Some other crises are in between as well.
Tether successfully handled all the withdrawals and the crisis in between. A massive real market test that it passed.
With this said, let’s take a look at the data for USDT.
Daily Tether Printed
Here is the chart for the USDT printed per day.
As we can see in the first years there was not a lot of printing for USDT. The larger amounts started to come in 2020 and increased significantly in 2021.
On occasions there was more than 2B USDT issued or burned per day. We can notice a few spikes down in 2022, some of them with more than 5B on a day. In the last period in 2024 we can see a positive bars once again.
A spike towards the end of 2024 with more than 1B issued daily again.
When we zoom in 2024-2025 we get this:
In 2024 and 2025 we can see mostly positive daily bars for Tether.
There was a higher growth in the Tether supply towards the end of 2024, but then a slightly drop in January 2025. Since then, mostly there are positive daily bars for the Tether supply in 2025 with occasional negative but small bars.
Monthly USDT Printed
Here is the monthly chart.
A new record for monthly USDT was issued in November 2024. A total of 13B USDT was issued in this month! Quite the achievement. This is the period when the Bitcoin price surpassed 100k for the first time so the Tether issuance followed that trend.
**When we zoom in 2024-2025 we have this:
We can see that November 2024 was great for Tether. There is literally no negative monthly bar in the period of 2024 to 2025.
Tether Supply
The chart for the USDT supply looks like this.
A big increase in 2020 – 2021 period, reaching 83B in market cap in the beginning of 2022. Then in May 2022 a big drop, and in the summer of 2022, the market cap of Tether was around 67B.
A strong growth in the first quarter of 2023, a slowdown in the summer of 2023 and then a growth again towards the end of 2023 and all of 2024.
In the last months Tether has set a new all-time high with now close to 150B in circulation. The 100B mark was passed at the beginning of March 2024.
Here we can see more closely the growth in the last two years. A continuous growth.
USDC VS USDT
How is Tether doing against the number one competitor USDC? USDC has come a bit later to the scene, so it has some catching up to do.
Here is the chart.
Up until May 2022, both stablecoins had a similar pattern. Then TerraUST happened and the market cap for Tether decreased while the market cap for USDC increased. This short lived as Tether regain its growth, while USDC kept going down.
During the bear market these two moved in opposite directions. In the last year the trend changed and now both of the stablecoins started growing again with Tether growing faster than USDC.
If we zoom in 2023 - 2025 we got this:
As already mentioned these two are moving almost in opposite directions up to recently.
March 2023 was the month with the most volatility when USDC dropped and USDT increased. Since then, USDC kept going down and it seems to be bottoming out around the 25B mark.
In 2024 both of the coins increased their supply with USDT growing from 91B to 138B, while USDC from 25B to 44B.
In the last period both of the coins have increased their market cap, although Tether is growing faster.
The market share of these two looks like this:
We can notice here that in the very last months USDC has increased its market share for the first time after 2023. The USDC supply has especially been growing on the Solana chain where it is used for the fast a low fees transactions.
The current share of these two is 70% to 30%. Previously USDC was closest to Tether in the summer of 2022 where it reached 45% share.
