USD Coin's market capitalization on the Stellar network increased 34.7 percent over the past 30 days, reaching $365.5 million—the highest growth rate among all tracked USDC deployments.
Circle selected Stellar as a core deployment network for its sub-5-second transaction finality, fees costing a fraction of a cent and its architecture built for cross-border payments.
Stellar, co-founded by Jed McCaleb in 2014, runs on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a Federated Byzantine Agreement mechanism that lets nodes confirm transactions by agreeing with a trusted set of peers, bypassing proof-of-work or proof-of-stake.
Circle first designated Stellar an official USDC chain in late 2020 through the Centre Consortium, with full API and business account support available by the first quarter of 2021. Circle assumed full governance and operations for USDC in August 2023 after the Centre Consortium dissolved.
Minting native USDC on Stellar required custom engineering. Stellar's default asset model allows only the original account creator to issue additional assets, so Circle had to build around the network's native architecture to support multiple authorized minting entities for its full-reserve model.
On May 19, Circle activated its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) on Stellar. The Stellar Development Foundation announced the integration, which connects Stellar to 23 other blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Base.
CCTP uses a burn-and-mint mechanism for cross-chain transfers. When USDC moves from Stellar to Ethereum, the Stellar-side USDC is permanently destroyed. Circle's off-chain Iris attestation service cryptographically signs the burn event, and an equivalent amount of native USDC is minted on Ethereum. The process maintains a constant total USDC supply without wrapped tokens or third-party bridge vaults.
Jonathan Lim, principal product manager at Circle, said CCTP V2 reduces trust assumptions, block-finality delays and liquidity fragmentation in traditional cross-chain flows.
Cross-chain transfers via CCTP on fast-finality networks like Stellar typically settle in under 60 seconds. CCTP V2 also introduced programmable post-transfer hooks, letting developers trigger automatic actions—such as asset swaps or deposits into lending protocols—immediately upon USDC arrival on the destination chain.
USDC on Stellar has recorded total payment volume exceeding $4.2 billion, with nearly 500,000 accounts holding trust lines. As of mid-2026, approximately $180.7 million in USDC was in active circulation on the network, representing about 0.23 percent of total USDC supply across all blockchains.
Range Security, a blockchain intelligence firm, analyzed USDC activity on Stellar between September 2024 and September 2025. The data showed a median transaction size of 1.57 USDC, indicating the network is used primarily for practical payments rather than speculative trading.
