Circle Mints 5 Billion USDC in a Week as Supply Race With Tether Heats up

A Record Week for Fresh Supply

Onchain analytics platform Solscan revealed the roughly 5 billion USDC mint earlier today, with analysts noting that the issuance is just one of many billion-dollar mints that have taken place this year.

To elaborate, earlier in April, Circle minted a record 3.25 billion USDC on Solana in seperate tranches, its biggest weekly issuance of 2026 at the time, and followed that with a 1.25 billion USDC mint on Solana in the week of August 20, including 250 million in a single day.

Consequently, Solana’s share of total USDC supply has climbed past 10% in 2026, even as Ethereum still holds roughly two-thirds of USDC in circulation.

Closing the Gap With Tether, Slowly

USDC’s circulating supply stood at about $74 billion, still less than half of Tether’s $183.1 billion market cap, with the two stablecoins together accounting for around 83% of a total stablecoin market worth $304 billion.

The company has leaned on transaction volume as its counterargument to Tether’s larger float, given USDC moved $18.3 trillion in 2025 against USDT’s $13.3 trillion, and carried roughly 70% of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in the first half of the year despite running on a fraction of the supply.

Timing Is Everything

The latest print comes just as Circle has taken on a new role as technical deployer for USDC on Hyperliquid, the derivatives exchange that activated its “AQAv2” upgrade today to route reserve yield on roughly $5 billion of USDC sitting on its platform into buybacks of its HYPE token.

Coinbase became Hyperliquid’s official USDC treasury deployer and Circle its technical infrastructure partner back in May, after Hyperliquid’s own USDH stablecoin was set to sunset in favor of USDC. That arrangement gives Circle a direct incentive to keep fresh USDC flowing toward platforms like Hyperliquid, since every dollar parked there as reserve now generates yield Circle’s partners can point to as a growth story, not just a balance-sheet number.

In any case, Circle’s next earnings disclosures should show whether this week’s issuance was a one-off spike or not. Additionally, analysts will also be watching whether Tether’s larger reserve base and its own recent surge in new holders forces Circle to compete more aggressively on distribution deals like the Hyperliquid arrangement, rather than supply alone, to keep closing the gap between the two stablecoins.

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