Stablecoin issuance data: USDC and USDT mints and burns on 5 chains

From October 27 to November 3, 2026, USDC and USDT issuers burned $3.5 billion more than they minted on five chains. Tether alone redeemed $4.0 billion on Ethereum. The USDC data also shows how much of what looks like issuance is not. On four of these chains, about 9 in 10 USDC mint events are not new issuance at all. They are Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) moving existing USDC from one chain to another.

What CCTP is

CCTP is Circle's native bridge for USDC. It burns USDC on the source chain and mints the same amount on the destination chain. It uses no wrapped token and no bridge pool. Circle launched CCTP in April 2023 (opens in a new tab) and CCTP V2 in March 2025 (opens in a new tab).

For example, a user sends 1,000 USDC from Ethereum to Base through CCTP. Ethereum burns 1,000 USDC and Base mints 1,000 USDC. Total USDC supply does not change. On each chain, though, the burn and the mint look the same as Circle issuing or redeeming USDC. This post separates the two. "Issuer" below means every USDC mint and burn that is not a CCTP transfer.

7-day mint and burn

Window: 2026-10-27 to 2026-11-03 UTC. Solana cannot be split, so its row includes any CCTP activity.

CCTP made 41% of USDC mint volume on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum One, and Arc this week. By count, it made 88% to 96% of mint events on those chains. A count of every mint event therefore mostly measures cross-chain movement, not new USDC. Any issuance figure built that way overstates issuance.

Tether's $4.0 billion came from 2 Redeem events on Ethereum. Tether's Ethereum contract records supply changes with its own Issue and Redeem events, so this post counts those directly.

Mint size

Issuer USDC mints over the 90 days to November 2, 2026. Arc has 47 days of data and Solana 71.

Solana is the outlier. Its USDC enters in a few large batches, with 90% of volume in mints of $100 million or more. On the EVM chains, issuer minting is spread across many small mints. The data shows the pattern but not who is behind each minter.

When issuers mint

Ethereum issuer mints cluster between 13:00 and 17:00 UTC on weekdays, with Friday the busiest day and Sunday the quietest. Those hours overlap US and European business hours. Solana shows the same weekday pattern.

Three years of issuance by chain

Issuer net issuance is mints minus burns, with CCTP excluded.

Ethereum's issuer USDC peaked at +$29.7 billion in October 2025 and fell to -$5.9 billion a year later. Over the same 3 years, CCTP brought a net $30.9 billion of USDC into Ethereum. Over those 3 years, Ethereum's net USDC additions came through CCTP, not from issuer minting on Ethereum. Circle does not publish USDC supply by chain, so the data cannot show why this changed.

Base is the only one of the three large EVM chains where issuers minted more USDC than they burned over 3 years. Coinbase reports Base as the leading Layer-2 network for spot trading and DeFi value locked (opens in a new tab) as of Q3 2026.

Tether last issued USDT on Ethereum in April 2026. Since then, its only Ethereum activity was redemptions. Tether reports total USDT issuance steady at about $184 billion (opens in a new tab) through Q3 2026 but does not say which chains it issues on.

Method

The data comes from mainnet_raw_logs (Ethereum), base_raw_logs (Base), solana_stable_coin_transfers (Solana), arbitrum_one_raw_logs (Arbitrum One), and arc_mainnet_raw_logs (Arc). On EVM chains, a mint is a Transfer event from the zero address and a burn is a Transfer event to it. On Solana, a mint is a MintTo or MintToChecked instruction and a burn is a Burn or BurnChecked instruction, with only successful instructions counted (status = 1).

USDC's FiatToken contract also emits a Mint(address indexed minter, address indexed to, uint256 amount) event and a Burn(address indexed burner, uint256 amount) event next to the zero-address Transfer, in the same transaction. CCTP burns USDC on a source chain and mints it on a destination chain, and its TokenMinter contract calls mint() and burn() directly on FiatToken. So TokenMinter's address is the minter on a CCTP mint and the burner on a CCTP burn. Addresses come from Circle's contract address reference (opens in a new tab) and the CCTP V1 EVM reference (opens in a new tab). Everything else is issuer activity.

Arc has no CCTP V1 deployment, because Circle added Arc to CCTP in September 2026, after V1 became legacy. Arc's Mint and Burn events come from arc_mainnet_raw_logs.

Example query, splitting Ethereum USDC mints into CCTP and issuer:

WITH mints AS (
  SELECT transaction_hash, log_index,
    any('0x' || substring(splitByChar(',', topics)[2], 27, 40)) AS minter,
    any(reinterpretAsUInt256(reverse(unhex(substring(data, 3))))) / 1e6 AS vol
  FROM mainnet_raw_logs
  WHERE address = '0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0ce3606eb48'
    AND splitByChar(',', topics)[1] = '0xab8530f87dc9b59234c4623bf917212bb2536d647574c8e7e5da92c2ede0c9f8'
    AND is_deleted = 0
    AND block_timestamp >= toUnixTimestamp('2026-10-27 00:00:00')
    AND block_timestamp < toUnixTimestamp('2026-11-03 00:00:00')
  GROUP BY transaction_hash, log_index
)
SELECT if(minter IN (
    '0xc4922d64a24675e16e1586e3e3aa56c06fabe907',
    '0xfd78ee919681417d192449715b2594ab58f5d002'
  ), 'cctp', 'issuer') AS mint_type,
  count() AS mint_count, sum(vol) AS mint_volume
FROM mints
GROUP BY mint_type

solana_stable_coin_transfers cannot carry the same split. All 301 USDC MintTo instructions in the window share one mint_authority. That address is a 355-byte SPL Token multisig owned by the SPL Token program, confirmed by a Solana RPC call. That multisig is Circle's single declared minter for every path, CCTP included. Burn instructions record the burning wallet itself as authority, true for a CCTP call as for any other burn. Neither field splits Solana activity, so this post leaves it unsplit.

Goldsky confirmed that mint_type = cctp plus issuer equals all for every row in issuance-7d.csv, issuance-monthly.csv, and mint-size.csv. All but one of 403 monthly rows match exactly. Base USDC in August 2026 shows a $45,424 mint-volume gap, 0.0012% of that month's volume. The gap comes from the two queries running minutes apart while the chain kept appending blocks.

Query files for the CCTP split: cctp-split-ethereum.sql, cctp-split-base.sql, cctp-split-arbitrum.sql, cctp-split-arc.sql, and solana-mint-authority-check.sql.

FAQ

Does a bridge transfer show up as a mint or a burn?
It depends on the bridge. CCTP burns USDC on the source chain and mints it on the destination chain. Lock-and-wrap bridges hold USDC in a contract and issue a wrapped token on the other chain. In the USDC data, that is a transfer, not a mint or burn.

Why can a chain show a net burn when its stablecoin supply grew?
Issuer net issuance on one chain does not track supply on that chain. USDC can leave a chain through issuer redemptions and arrive through CCTP, which is what the Ethereum data shows.

Why does Ethereum show no USDT mints since April 2026?
Tether emitted no Issue event on Ethereum after April 2026. Tether does not publish its reasons.

How can someone get this data from Goldsky?
Goldsky's Turbo Pipelines (opens in a new tab) stream raw logs and Solana token instructions into a database such as ClickHouse or Postgres. A pipeline filtered to the USDC and USDT contracts and their Mint, Burn, Issue, and Redeem events produces the same data.