Circle’s USDC deployment on Stellar sees 35% market cap growth in 30 days

USDC supply on the Stellar network jumped 34.7% over the past 30 days, pushing the stablecoin’s market cap on the chain to $365.5 million. That’s a meaningful surge for a network that has quietly positioned itself as the go-to rail for cross-border payments and remittances.

The growth spurt didn’t happen in a vacuum. It tracks closely with Circle’s deployment of its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, known as CCTP, on Stellar back in May 2026. The protocol connects Stellar to 23 other blockchains, and it appears to be doing exactly what it was designed to do: make USDC flow more freely across the multi-chain landscape.

What CCTP changes about cross-chain USDC

Before CCTP, moving USDC between chains typically meant relying on wrapped tokens or third-party bridges. Wrapped tokens introduce counterparty risk because you’re trusting an intermediary to back the wrapped version one-to-one. Bridges, meanwhile, have been the favorite target of hackers for years, with billions lost to exploits across DeFi.

CCTP sidesteps both problems by using a burn-and-mint mechanism. When you send USDC from Ethereum to Stellar, the tokens on Ethereum are burned and new ones are minted natively on Stellar. No wrappers, no bridges, no middlemen holding your funds in a smart contract.

The protocol now connects Stellar to major ecosystems including Ethereum and Solana, giving users 23 blockchain destinations in total.

Circle’s data as of August 7, 2026, pegged the Stellar-specific USDC supply at roughly $360.5 million.

Stellar’s quiet rise as a stablecoin network

USDC first landed on Stellar in February 2021, following an announcement the previous October. Since then, the network has processed over 4.5 million USDC transactions, with total payments volume crossing the $3 billion mark.

The $365.5 million in USDC on Stellar still represents a fraction of the stablecoin’s overall footprint. Total USDC circulation across all supported chains sits at nearly $72 billion as of early August 2026. Stellar’s share comes out to roughly 0.5% of the total supply.

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