Stablecoins quietly did $1.79 trillion in June — and USDC has pulled ahead of Tether

Even as crypto prices fell through a rough stretch, the dollar-pegged tokens known as stablecoins had their busiest month on record. Payments giant Visa's data dashboard shows about $1.79 trillion moved in adjusted stablecoin transactions in June, up 63% from May, and Circle's USDC, not the larger USDT, handled most of it.

A stablecoin is a crypto token designed to stay worth about one US dollar, so people use it the way they might use cash inside the crypto world: to trade, to send money across borders, and to park value without cashing out to a bank. Visa's figure tries to strip out noise like trading bots and exchange housekeeping to estimate real, economic use.

The surprise is who is doing the work. Tether's USDT is still the biggest stablecoin by total size, but USDC accounted for roughly two-thirds of June's transaction volume, with USDT closer to a third. USDC has been gaining as banks and financial firms, including Standard Chartered and BNY, build services around it, and as Europe's new MiCA rules push regulated, compliant tokens to the front.

Most of that activity runs on a handful of networks. Coinbase's Base and Ethereum each handled a little over $560 billion in June, with Tron next at about $320 billion. The takeaway is that stablecoins have quietly become crypto's plumbing, the part that keeps working even when the headlines are about prices falling.

For beginners, stablecoins are useful but not risk-free. Their value depends on the company behind them actually holding safe reserves, and on regulators allowing them. Revolut, for example, is dropping USDT for European users under the new rules. A stablecoin is not a bank deposit and is not government-insured, so it is worth knowing who issues the one you hold.