How USDC holds its peg

USDC has no blockchain and no consensus of its own. It's a token on dozens of chains, created when dollars reach Circle and destroyed when they leave. Each transfer is only as final as the chain it happens on.

Read how it works

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Just minted and burned

    USDC tokens dollars, into and out of the reserve tokens being burned Circle's cross-chain attestation a chain's ledger flashes as it settles USDC reserve: Treasury repo, bills, cash
    Supply by chain Reading supplies…
    How this is read

    Each chain's raw on-chain supply, read from a public node every 10 to 60 seconds. Circle's own "in circulation" figure is a little lower: it subtracts tokens that exist on a chain but haven't been issued to anyone, and frozen tokens. Use the arrow keys to read each row.

    USDC supply on each chain
    ChainSupplyShareRead at
    Minted and burned
    • minted, up
    • burned, down

    Use the left and right arrow keys to read each column. In live mode each column is one minute; minutes before you connected include only Ethereum, Base, Avalanche and OP Mainnet.

    USDC minted and burned in each recent period
    PeriodMintedBurnedNet
    What just happened (illustrative) 0 USDC in circulation 0 in reserve 0 minted 0 burned 0 chains shown

      The parts that make this work

      What a stablecoin is, and isn't

      USDC is a token that Circle promises to redeem for one US dollar. It isn't a blockchain: it has no validators, no blocks and no consensus. It exists as a token contract or issued asset on each chain Circle supports, 38 of them for issuing and redeeming as of August 2026, and a USDC balance is just an entry in that chain's state. Circle's job is to keep the number of tokens and the dollars in reserve in step. The chains' job is to agree on who holds which tokens.

      USDC launched in 2018, governed by Centre, a consortium of Circle and Coinbase. Circle has issued it on its own since Centre was wound up in 2023, and has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange as CRCL since June 5, 2025.

      Minting and redeeming

      Only businesses with a Circle Mint account deal with Circle directly. They wire dollars and receive newly minted USDC on the chain they choose, or send USDC back and receive dollars, one for one. Circle says it charges no fee to turn dollars into USDC. Everyone else gets USDC from those customers: exchanges, wallets and payment apps. That arbitrage is what holds the price near a dollar: if USDC trades below $1, Mint customers can buy it and redeem it at par.

      On EVM chains a mint shows up on-chain as a transfer from the zero address and a burn as a transfer to it, which is how live mode spots them.

      What backs each token

      Circle publishes a USDC Reserve Report every month, examined by its independent accountants. On August 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm UTC it reported 73,320,757,305 USDC in circulation against reserves with a fair value of $73,398,532,613. Most sits in the Circle Reserve Fund (ticker USDXX), an SEC-registered government money market fund managed by BlackRock that Circle owns on behalf of USDC holders; the rest is held directly.

      USDC reserve, August 31, 2026
      Held inUS dollars
      Circle Reserve Fund: overnight Treasury repo49,584,000,000
      Circle Reserve Fund: Treasury bills11,918,146,195
      Circle Reserve Fund: cash, net of settlement timing815,228,230
      Held directly: Treasury bills1,301,292,779
      Held directly: cash at regulated financial institutions, net of settlement timing9,779,865,409
      Total reserve73,398,532,613

      The repo is overnight lending to large financial institutions, over-collateralised by Treasuries; the latest bill in the report matures in November 2026. These figures are published monthly and are not on-chain: live mode shows them as they were reported, not as they are now. Source: USDC Reserve Report, August 2026 (PDF, published September 29, 2026).

      A transfer is only as final as its chain

      Circle takes no part in an ordinary transfer. When you send USDC on Ethereum, it is settled like any other Ethereum transaction: included in a block, then final after about two epochs of validator attestations. On Solana it's final when the slot is finalised, on the XRP Ledger when the ledger is validated, on Algorand, Hedera, Avalanche and XDC by their own rules. A rollup such as Base or Arbitrum orders transactions itself and settles to Ethereum later. The same token has as many kinds of finality as it has chains.

      CCTP: moving between chains

      Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol moves USDC by burning it on the source chain and minting it on the destination. Circle's attestation service, Iris, watches for the burn and signs a message the destination contract accepts as permission to mint. Version 2 launched in March 2025 with Fast Transfer, which attests in seconds instead of waiting for the source chain's finality, and hooks that run code on arrival; in November 2025 it became the standard version, and Circle lists 27 chains for it. Circle has said the original contracts will be paused on December 1, 2026. Because CCTP burns and mints real tokens, many of the mints and burns in live mode are USDC changing chains, not dollars entering or leaving the reserve.

      Freezing, compliance and the law

      Circle can block addresses. Its USDC terms let it freeze tokens held by or sent to an address it has blocked, to comply with a law, regulation or court order, and the token contracts on each chain carry that power. The August reserve report excluded 129,900,512 such "access denied" tokens from circulation.

      In the United States, the GENIUS Act became law on July 18, 2025. It requires payment stablecoins to be backed one for one by cash, bank deposits, short Treasury bills, Treasury repo or government money market funds, and reserves to be disclosed monthly. It takes effect on January 18, 2027 or 120 days after regulators finish their rules, whichever is earlier; those rules were still being written in September 2026. On July 10, 2026 the OCC gave final approval to Circle's national trust bank, which Circle says could later manage the USDC reserve. In the EU, Circle's French subsidiary has held an electronic money institution licence since July 2024, which lets it issue USDC under MiCA.

      What live mode shows

      Live mode reads 26 of the chains USDC is issued on, straight from public nodes. It reads each chain's supply every 10 to 60 seconds and adds them up. On Ethereum it reads every new block's USDC transfers, which gives the transfer rate, the volume and every mint and burn. On Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche and OP Mainnet it polls for mints and burns every 10 to 15 seconds. On the other chains it shows a change in supply between two readings as a net mint or burn, with no transaction behind it. Mints and burns are grouped by the minute, and a busy Ethereum block becomes a handful of dots, not hundreds. Every figure on screen is real except the reserve, which comes from Circle's latest monthly report and is labelled with its date.

      What the animation simplifies

      Circle's reserve is drawn as one vault; in reality it's a fund, a custodian and several banks, and dollars move by wire, often with a day's delay. Each chain is a small ring of wallets, not millions of accounts, and the particles are a scale model: in live mode one standing dot is about half a billion USDC. Step-by-step mode starts from an illustrative billion. The live total is raw supply on the chains tracked; about a dozen smaller chains aren't read, and Circle's circulation figure subtracts unissued and frozen tokens. Read Circle's USDC documentation for the details.