Did USDC Really Overtake USDT in Transaction Volume?

Can you believe that USDC has surpassed USDT in annual transaction volume?

That claim started circulating in the media yesterday. The source was said to be the Japanese investment bank Mizuho Financial Group. But none of the articles actually linked to the original source.

Today I spent quite a while trying to track it down, and it looks like most of the references eventually lead to a single article on Investing Pro. According to the editors themselves, the piece was generated with the help of AI.

The article claims that Mizuho raised its valuation of Circle Internet Group. The reason given is that over the past 12 months, the transaction volume of USDC has exceeded that of USDT for the first time since 2018.

That raises several questions for me.

1. What does "for the first time since 2018" even mean?
Did this supposedly happen back in 2018 as well? That sounds unlikely. By then USDT was already a globally dominant stablecoin, while USDC had only just been launched.

2. Why would transaction volume affect the valuation of the issuer at all?
Stablecoin issuers do not earn revenue from transaction activity. The fees go to validators on the blockchains where those transactions take place. Stablecoin issuers make money from the reserves backing their tokens - which are tied to the size of the supply, not to how often the tokens move. And in terms of total supply, USDC is still far behind USDT. So it is not obvious why an investment bank would raise a company's valuation based on transaction volume.

But the most important point is this: I simply do not see this shift in practice.

Yes, interest in USDC is growing. But on Rabbit.io, USDT is still the most frequently used stablecoin. If USDC transactions had really overtaken USDT globally, you would probably expect to see the same pattern among our users - more swaps involving USDC than USDT. Yet that is not what we observe.

At Rabbit.io, we are ready to swap any volume of USDT, USDC, or many other stablecoins quickly and efficiently. But for now, our clients continue to choose USDT.