Tether’s USDT gains 1.6M holders in past week, outpacing USDC by nearly 3x

USDT added roughly 1.6 million new holders over the past week, dwarfing USDC’s 591,100 new holders during the same stretch. That’s a nearly 3-to-1 ratio, and it tells you everything about where stablecoin adoption is actually happening right now. The numbers land at a moment when the broader stablecoin market has cooled from its May 2026 peak. Yet Tether’s user base keeps expanding like it didn’t get the memo. The company’s cumulative holder count crossed 650 million by the end of Q2 2026, with quarterly additions consistently topping 30 million users. The scale gap keeps widening Tether’s market cap sits at approximately $183 billion as of mid-August 2026. USDC, by comparison, ranges between $72 billion and $74 billion. Put differently, USDT is about 2.5 times larger than its closest competitor by total supply. Tether’s financial position helps explain the confidence. The company posted approximately $1.5 billion in net operating profit for Q2 2026, backed by excess reserves of around $4.1 billion. As of June 30, 2026, USDT in circulation stood at roughly 184.6 billion tokens. Where each stablecoin wins USDC has frequently led in on-chain transaction volume metrics, meaning the to...