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...