The last printing of Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC was in May and June, respectively.
Stablecoins continue to play a very critical role in the crypto economy. The ongoing bear market also shows that the market value of dollar-pegged tokens such as USDT and USDC has grown parabolicly this year.
However, top stablecoin issuers appear to have halted issuance in December amid market turmoil and increased scrutiny. USDT, USDC, BUSD and TUSD have yet to print in the last month of 2022, according to data from “Stablecoin Printers.”
In fact, the two largest stablecoins by market cap have not been launched in the past few months.
The last time USDT was printed by its issuer Tether was in May 2022, while USDC printing continued until June of the same year.
The two tokens have been battling for dominance, and the decoupling and subsequent collapse of the Terra ecosystem’s now-defunct algorithmic stablecoin UST did help to narrow the gap between them.
USDT is trading low due to concerns about the spread of contagion caused by Terra. On the other hand, USDC has seen an increase in consumer confidence. This has led to a 4% year-to-date increase from $42.9 billion to $44.6 billion.
Market participants abandoned USDT for USDC. The latter went on to become the preferred stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain.
Terra’s collapse left a vacuum in the Cosmos ecosystem, where the algorithmically pegged dollar currency was heavily used across its family of interconnected blockchains. Stablecoin issuer Circle seized the opportunity to launch USDC natively on Cosmos in early 2022.
Meanwhile, Binance’s branded stablecoin BUSD happens to be another prominent player in the stablecoin space, which is on an upward growth trajectory.
BUSD’s market cap more than doubled from the start of 2022 through November. Despite a dip in the weeks that followed, the stablecoin has managed to increase its market cap by 12% year-to-date.
