For most of history, moving money has been slow, expensive, and complicated. Stablecoins, which started as crypto-native trading infrastructure, have evolved to allow people and corporations to move billions of dollars around the world for under a cent and in under a second.
Last year alone, stablecoins accounted for $9 trillion in annual transactions, putting them in the same league as Visa and PayPal, and U.S. dollar denominated stablecoin supply now exceeds $270 billion.
The move to the mainstream has made stablecoins one of the most important tools for global finance. Cross-border money movement, B2B payments, and FX are driving a growing share of the volume, with stablecoins increasingly serving to upgrade the parts of the financial system that have historically been slow and expensive.
At the center of this shift is Circle and its USDC stablecoin. Roughly $79 billion of USDC circulates across more than 30 chains, and a majority of cross-chain stablecoin movement runs through Circle’s CCTP. Circle’s relationships with banks, payment networks, and corporate treasuries have steadily turned USDC into one of the major units of account in parts of the financial system that crypto hasn’t yet reached.
