Circle minted roughly $5 billion in USDC over the past week, one of its largest weekly issuance pushes yet. The print lands the same week Circle became technical deployer for Hyperliquid's $5 billion USDC reserve.
Circle minted about 5 billion USDC over the last seven days, according to onchain analytics platform Solscan. Analysts tracking the mint noted it is just one of several billion-dollar issuance pushes Circle has made this year.
A Record Week for Fresh Supply
Earlier in April, Circle minted a record 3.25 billion USDC on Solana in separate tranches, its biggest weekly issuance of 2026 at the time. It followed that with a 1.25 billion USDC mint on Solana the week of August 20. That mint included 250 million in a single day.
As a result, Solana's share of total USDC supply has climbed past 10% in 2026, even as Ethereum still holds roughly two-thirds of USDC in circulation.
Closing the Gap With Tether, Slowly
USDC's circulating supply stood at about $74 billion in August. That is still less than half of Tether's $183.1 billion market cap. Together, the two stablecoins account for around 83% of a total stablecoin market worth $304 billion.
Circle leans on transaction volume as its counterargument to Tether's larger float. USDC moved $18.3 trillion in 2025 against USDT's $13.3 trillion. Despite running on a fraction of the supply, it also carried roughly 70% of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in the first half of the year.
Timing Aligns With Hyperliquid Role
The latest mint comes as Circle has taken on a new role as technical deployer for USDC on Hyperliquid. The derivatives exchange activated its "AQAv2" upgrade today to route reserve yield on roughly $5 billion of USDC sitting on its platform into buybacks of its HYPE token.
Coinbase became Hyperliquid's official USDC treasury deployer and Circle its technical infrastructure partner back in May, after Hyperliquid's own USDH stablecoin was set to sunset in favor of USDC. That arrangement gives Circle a direct incentive to keep fresh USDC flowing toward platforms like Hyperliquid, since every dollar parked there as reserve now generates yield Circle's partners can point to as a growth story.
Circle's next earnings disclosures should show whether this week's issuance was a one-off spike, and analysts will watch whether Tether's larger reserve base forces Circle to compete on distribution deals like the Hyperliquid arrangement rather than supply alone.
Source: Bitcoin News
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
