PayPal's PYUSD shrinks while Circle's USDC quietly ships $4.4B to Coinbase

The stablecoin sector, with a market cap of $315.62 billion as of press time, continues to be led by Tether's USDT at 59% and Circle's USDC at 24%, but the latest on-chain flows underline just how lopsided that race has become. PayPal's PYUSD, which hit an all-time-high market cap of $4.20 billion in March, has contracted roughly 35% to $2.47 billion, with $1.80 billion on the Ethereum [$ETH] network, $703 million on Solana [$SOL], $261 million on Arbitrum One [$ARB], and $3 million on Stellar Lumens [$XLM].

While PYUSD has been bleeding supply, Circle executed its largest transfer in history, sending $4.40 billion in USDC to the Coinbase Hyperliquid deployer in a move that reshapes liquidity depth, stablecoin flows, and trading activity across Coinbase and HyperliquidX [$HYPE]. On top of that, Circle minted $750 million in USDC on Solana in the past 24 hours, pushing USDC's market cap to $74.78 billion.

The dominance of USDT and USDC is reflected in transfer activity. USDC's asset transfer count for the past week stood at $133.6 million, slightly below USDT's $176.9 million, while USDT's weekly transfer count against other stablecoin issuers reached 176 million compared to 392 million. Over the past month, USDC's transfer count rose 27% to $466 million, and USDT's grew 2.1% to around $1.40 trillion, with USDT holders expanding by more than 5% and USDC holders by 4.7%.

The stablecoin market is no longer limited to the U.S. dollar, expanding into the Euro and Yen among other currencies, and Dragonfly's Rob Hadick has projected a potential 10x growth as payment adoption widens, arguing that stablecoins collapse existing bank-based infrastructure and reduce reliance on intermediaries. Tempo, a payment infrastructure built around that thesis, saw its stablecoin supply surge 35% in a week to $30 million, a figure that remains small relative to the broader $315.62 billion market.