Points of Focus

• Stablecoin transfers hit a record $1.79 trillion in June, up 63% month-on-month.
• USDC dominated with 67% of transaction volume, while USDT accounted for 32%.
• First-half 2026 stablecoin volume reached $8.82 trillion, already surpassing all of 2024.

Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume reached a record $1.79 trillion in June 2026, up 63% from May’s $1.1 trillion and 125% above June 2025, according to Visa’s Allium-powered onchain analytics dashboard. The adjusted methodology strips out high-frequency trading bots, exchange treasury rebalancing, and repeated smart contract transactions to isolate organic economic activity.

USDC (USDC) accounted for approximately 67% of that total at $1.21 trillion. Tether’s USDt (USDT) handled $576 billion, or roughly 32%. PayPal’s PYUSD registered $2.42 billion. Every other stablecoin combined held under 1% of adjusted volume.

Adjusted Stablecoin Volume Hits Record $1.79T in June, Up 63% from May

According to Visa Onchain Analytics, adjusted stablecoin transaction volume reached a record $1.79 trillion in June, up 63% from $1.10 trillion in May and surpassing the previous high of $1.78 trillion set… pic.twitter.com/r9kfkREf9A

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 6, 2026

The first half of 2026 totaled $8.82 trillion in adjusted stablecoin transactions, surpassing the entire 2024 figure of $5.8 trillion with six months remaining in the year. It trails only 2025’s full-year record of $10.8 trillion, a figure the current trajectory makes plausible to match before December.

“June 2026 was another record month for stablecoin transaction volume (according to the Allium measure), just ahead of February 2026,” said Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale.

https://twitter.com/LowBeta/status/2073907325690102119/photo/1

Nick Ruck, director of LVRG Research, described the surge as evidence that stablecoins are becoming infrastructure for value transfer, liquidity provision, and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity that persists independently of speculative price movements.

The market cap versus volume divergence tells the real story

The gap between Tether’s market cap dominance and USDC’s transaction dominance is the structural argument Jeremy Allaire has been making since Open Standard’s OUSD launched on June 30. Tether holds $184 billion in circulation, more than twice USDC’s $77 billion. By market cap, Tether is the larger stablecoin by a significant margin. By actual usage, measured in dollars of economic activity flowing through each token monthly, USDC is processing more than twice what Tether handles.

Allaire cited Artemis data showing USDC accounted for about 80% of dollar stablecoin transaction volume in Q1 2026, a figure that has moderated to 67% in June’s Visa data set but remains dominant. The divergence reflects where each stablecoin is being used.

Tether dominates emerging-market trading, offshore settlement, and retail crypto speculation, categories that generate large balances but lower transaction frequency. USDC dominates institutional payments, DeFi protocol settlement, developer infrastructure, and cross-border business-to-business transfers, categories that generate lower balances but far higher transaction velocity.

Standard Chartered and BNY have both recently added USDC services rather than building proprietary stablecoin infrastructure. Circle’s USYC is the world’s largest tokenized money market fund. USDC runs natively across 34 blockchain networks.

Circle’s Circle Payments Network recorded $8.3 billion in annualized transaction volume in Q1 2026. These are the institutional adoption vectors that explain why a $77-billion market cap token is processing transaction volumes that a $184-billion token cannot match.

The OUSD threat arrives into a market USDC already dominates

The timing of the volume data is pointed. Open Standard’s OUSD coalition, including Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, and Stripe, launched six days before this data was published. OUSD has not yet issued a single token. Its launch is targeted for later in 2026.

The June volume record is therefore a precise snapshot of the moat OUSD must cross: $1.21 trillion in a single month, flowing through an asset with a decade of integrations, regulatory approvals across multiple jurisdictions, and institutional distribution partnerships that OUSD backers themselves continue to use simultaneously.

Paxos’ Global Dollar Network, known as USDG, launched in 2024 with a similar revenue-sharing consortium model and reached about $3 billion in supply. USDC processed $1.21 trillion in June alone. The scale of the gap, not the roster of backers, is what determines whether OUSD eventually challenges the data Visa published today.