Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong disclosed three platform-scale figures on Thursday, giving the most detailed public accounting to date of how deeply stablecoins and agentic payments have embedded in the exchange's operations.
Armstrong's post on X quoted an article by Alec Lovett, Coinbase's Head of Infrastructure Products.
“Stablecoins are quickly becoming the backbone of how money moves globally,” Lovett wrote. “Coinbase processes nearly $1T of stablecoin movement annually and holds nearly $20B in USDC on platform, the blockchain Base has processed $19T in stablecoin volume so far this year, and x402, our agentic payments protocol, has processed 160M+ agentic payments in the last year.”
Coinbase's Q1 2026 earnings deck, filed with the SEC, showed average USDC held in Coinbase products reached $19 billion in the quarter, an all-time high. More than 25% of all USDC in circulation sits in Coinbase's ecosystem, according to the same filing. Armstrong's $20 billion figure reflects a spot reading after Q1 closed, consistent with the upward trajectory in the earnings disclosure.
USDC's total circulating supply stands at $75 billion, per DefiLlama, with the majority on Ethereum at $48.5 billion. The stablecoin hit an all-time high market cap of roughly $80 billion in March 2026.
