Digital dollars on the internet
Circle’s mission is to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. We operate our business every day with the conviction that the benefits of blockchain-based commerce — speed, cost, and access — can begin to meaningfully unlock prosperity for billions of people around the world.
While USDC is already helping to accelerate the evolution of traditional financial services in the developed world, its near-term impact could be greatest for the 1.4 billion people who are unbanked.13 Many of these individuals live in places where mobile telephony, the internet, and fintech have already leapfrogged analog infrastructure, including brick-and-mortar banking. USDC is a way to deliver low-cost, transparent, digital dollars directly into their hands.
This is all possible because of USDC’s inherent openness. USDC is built on the foundation of open blockchain networks that make it possible to weave money, payments, lending, and other programmable features directly into the fabric of the internet. Through 2024, USDC was natively available on 16 blockchains, including Ethereum, the world’s largest smart-contract blockchain, and many “third-generation” blockchains engineered from the ground up for near-instant, near-free payment settlement.14
The slow path to moving money quickly
It once took more than two months to move information across the Atlantic. Faster ships, the telegraph, fax systems, and the internet have reduced data lag down to milliseconds.
The transfer of money, however, has remained stubbornly slower. While ACH, SWIFT, and fintech brought incremental improvements, money still lagged behind non-financial data until the arrival of blockchain, which brings internet speed and scale to the settlement of financial value.
Open systems move business forward
Hear Elisabeth Carpenter, Circle’s Chief Operating Officer, talk about the power of open networks
Growing the USDC user base
[fs-toc-h2]Growing the USDC user base
Around the world, the number of people using USDC continues to steadily climb. Since the beginning of 2023, the amount of wallets holding at least $10 USDC has nearly doubled, with much of that growth occurring in 2024.
Number of digital wallets holding at least 10 USDC
This is part of a larger, secular shift in financial services that has been underway for at least two decades. The launch of mobile and smartphones in the early to mid 2000s and regulations like the EU’s Payment Service Directives (PSDs) have paved the way for technology firms to begin offering financial services.15
Taken together, the digitization of finance is driving significant changes, with digital wallets (including wallets linked to payment cards) emerging as a favored payment method.16 Business payments are also digitizing rapidly, as detailed in greater depth later in this report.
Over the past year, Circle has partnered with many businesses that can now distribute USDC directly to millions of their own users. While nascent, we expect these partnerships — with their immense user bases — to help drive the next phase of USDC growth by expanding the pathways for dollar access.
Global businesses turn to Circle
From powerhouse financial institutions and enterprise technology companies to pioneering payments firms, business interest in our platform is growing.
Around the world, diverse businesses are taking advantage of the platform Circle provides to better serve their customers, operate more efficiently, and create new connections. USDC is borderless, always-on, and enables near-instant payments, helping to power the next wave of global commerce.17
Opening the internet financial system
[fs-toc-h2]Opening the internet financial system
This USDC user base is growing in tandem with the rise of an internet-native financial system. This system is predicated on creating new ways to exchange value and is beginning to augment the activities of the traditional financial system.
Over time, we expect more traditional financial activity will migrate to this internet financial system as more people, businesses, and institutions coalesce around the unparalleled utility offered by open internet protocols. This trendline has been established from information to communications and, now — courtesy of stablecoins — to money itself.
To understand this coming shift and the role that Circle seeks to play, it is worth revisiting the growth arc of the early internet. The emergence of the commercial internet in the 1990s — and the subsequent advance of “write” access throughout the early 2000s — gave rise to new forms of platform businesses that empower builders and directly connect users with each other. These platform businesses dominate the internet to this day, spanning social media, ride sharing, e-commerce, app marketplaces, and more. By amassing significant network effects and global scale, they create utility that leads to deep, sustained engagement with a committed user base.
The rise of digital currencies like USDC springs from the collision of money with Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law.19 In the real world and on the internet, U.S. dollars are a network-effects currency. Circle is building USDC as a technology platform that can harness the internet’s scale, speed, and cost advantages to enable similar network effects and utility for financial services, building on the strength and widespread use of the dollar today.
To that end, we have designed USDC using open-source standards and smart contract blockchains so that any developer can easily access the tools they need to build global, scalable digital dollar applications. This programmability and composability are game-changers: it gives USDC enhanced powers and new applications compared to traditional dollars.
Circle offers developers a wide range of additional services designed to make USDC easier to use for their businesses, and ultimately their customers. This includes several types of USDC-enabled wallets that businesses can directly plug into existing customer interfaces with just a few lines of code, along with a growing library of smart contract templates that eliminate much of the complexity of creating apps on blockchains. Other services focus on simplifying the payment of network transaction fees, which are typically denominated in a blockchain’s native token, creating extra steps and barriers to usage. We are now enabling payment of these fees in USDC.
As a regulated financial services business, we also put compliance at the forefront of everything we do. Developers and businesses building on our platform can gain access to tools that help ensure compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) standards through real-time transaction screening, ongoing monitoring, and satisfying Travel Rule obligations. Circle’s new Compliance Engine gives developers resources to help meet their compliance needs, exporting safe, sound, and responsible tools to the wider digital assets ecosystem.
Over the past two decades, leading cloud providers have solved on-demand data storage and other hard problems to enable today’s internet companies to focus less on the backend and devote more resources and attention to innovation and customer experience. In similar fashion, Circle provides a comprehensive toolkit that can facilitate the growth of “Web3,” which embeds value-exchange directly into the fabric of the internet. Web3 can make users the owners of their data and other technological assets — including money. In addition, Web3 can be a new foundational layer of the internet, offering new approaches to corporate governance, value creation, and stakeholder participation.20
Just as 94% of the Fortune 500 now relies on the public cloud for business operations,21 we expect a growing share of major companies will gravitate toward this internet of value in the coming years. According to some studies, more than half of surveyed Fortune 500 executives say their companies are already building on the blockchain.22
A new financial layer for the internet
Circle and USDC bring the efficiencies of the cloud to the world of money. Using our platform, enterprises and developers can more easily create the next generation of payments and financial apps.
Today’s apps use the cloud to share data globally
USDC brings native financial services to the cloud
Our developer tools give USDC added utility
Beyond making it easier to launch individual applications, Circle also offers enhancements that can turn USDC into the connective tissue that creates a broad network of services across the blockchain ecosystem. The launch of Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) in 2023 is one such example.
One reason why email became globally popular is that its reach was universal, with SMTP enabling seamless correspondence among users no matter which service they used.
Similarly, CCTP facilitates interoperability for USDC across supported blockchain networks. By eliminating the longstanding friction and risk of transferring value between blockchains — which inherently cannot communicate with one another — CCTP turns a wide swath of the growing blockchain ecosystem into a single interconnected network where USDC can easily flow.
While still early in its lifecycle, CCTP has already become the primary way USDC is moved from one blockchain to another. Since its inception, CCTP has processed more than $20 billion in USDC transfers.23
Volume of USDC transferred over CCTP24
Nurturing global developer ecosystems
[fs-toc-h2]Nurturing global developer ecosystems
The movement of money touches nearly every facet of commerce, both locally and globally. USDC and Circle’s technology solutions, built on open protocols and programmability, give any software developer the familiar tools they need — including APIs in standard programming languages — to create powerful applications that upgrade our financial system.
Developers are already taking advantage of this new opportunity to build the internet financial system. Critically, this is happening from both the bottom up and the top down. Entrepreneurs are using USDC and our platform to create entirely new categories of financial apps. Enterprises, meanwhile, are tapping into this same infrastructure to integrate the efficiencies of USDC and blockchain into their existing operations.
Each day, Circle is investing in the growth of the blockchain ecosystem and developer community. Around the world, we lead workshops and offer other resources that make it easier for developers to get hands-on and access the power of digital dollars. We help unlock the USDC platform for developers who need to integrate enterprise-grade software and onboard users onto trusted applications built for the digital dollar use cases highlighted throughout this report.
To date, much of the USDC developer activity has been centered on deepening the connections between the blockchain ecosystem and traditional financial rails. These connections act as on- and off-ramps that make USDC more impactful for existing payments use cases. These activities support and augment the development of a more robust on-chain economy where a full range of financial activity connecting buyers, sellers, and merchants can happen natively on blockchains.
Entrepreneurs build with USDC to drive inclusion
Circle hosts “Unlocking Impact,” a pitch competition series that supports builders as they strive toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The growing intersection of blockchain and AI is another area of growing interest across the USDC developer community. While nascent, there are signs that autonomous payments with USDC could begin to open up new business models for internet goods and create easier ways for people to consume them. The Circle platform is poised to help developers build toward this future.25
This on-chain economy is emerging across multiple blockchains, which further emphasizes the need for neutral, interoperable infrastructure — including USDC and CCTP — that eliminates the friction of doing business across these networks. In fact, the top six blockchains by builder interest26 all feature native USDC availability and full CCTP integration, underscoring Circle’s centrality to this growing ecosystem of builders and creators.
Top blockchains by developer interest27
2025 State of the USDC Economy report
“COVID-19 Boosted the Adoption of Digital Financial Services.” World Bank Group. July 21, 2022. Retrieved from: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/07/21/covid-19-boosted-the-adoption-of-digital-financial-services
Native availability of USDC through November 30, 2024.
“2025 World Payments Report.” CapGemini. Retrieved from: https://www.capgemini.com/at-de/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2024/09/WPR_2025_web.pdf
Ibid.
All the companies shown here do not necessarily have formal commercial agreements in place with Circle.
“The Continued Growth and Resilience of Apple’s App Store Ecosystem.” Analysis Group. May 2023. Retrieved from: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/the-continued-growth-and-resilience-of-apples-app-store-ecosystem.pdf
Moore’s Law refers to the historical tendency of computer capabilities to double roughly every two years. Metcalfe’s Law expresses the idea that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the network.
“How Web3 will level the playing field and unlock income equality.” World Economic Forum. Dante Disparte. May 25, 2022. Retrieved from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/what-is-web3-why-care-future/
“Cloud Outage & the Fortune 500.” Parametrix. Retrieved from: https://www.parametrixinsurance.com/cloud-outage-and-the-fortune-500-analysis
“The State of Crypto: The Fortune 500 Moving Onchain.” Coinbase. June 12, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/the-state-of-crypto-the-fortune-500-moving-onchain
Through December 10, 2024
Monthly figures since service inception and through November 30, 2024.
“Enabling AI Agents with Blockchain.” The Circle blog. November 6, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.circle.com/blog/enabling-ai-agents-with-blockchain
Builder Energy - “The blockchains that founders say they are — or are interested in — building on.” A16Zcrypto. Retrieved from: https://builderenergy.a16zcrypto.com/
Ibid.