ERC-20 stablecoins' market cap nearly doubled from January

Following the coronavirus outbreak earlier this year, traditional markets went through yet another meltdown. It was not long before the cryptocurrency sector followed as well. While the reasons behind this are still a topic of discussions throughout the community, this period did not equally hit all coins.

Stablecoins explode as the crypto market crashes

Stablecoins — and especially Ethereum-based stablecoins — flourished during the volatile period. In fact, their market cap surged by nearly 100% YTD, hitting $6.25 billion.

According to a report published by Matteo Leibowitz, this sharp surge likely comes for two reasons. The first one is, of course, the recent market volatility. The second one, however, is the expected inflation of foreign currencies against the USD, as Leibowitz suspects.

Ethereum’s version of Tether (USDT) is still the most dominant coin, with 77.84% of the market share. The coin’s own supply surged by around 113% from the start of the year until now. It grew from $2.3 billion to $4.9 billion in less than four months.

The strongest non-Tether stablecoins

At the same time, CENTRE Consortium’s stablecoin, USDC, remains the most dominant among the non-Tether stablecoins. After removing the market share belonging to Tether, 51.44% of the remaining amount belongs to USDC.

Meanwhile, USDC also sees a fair amount of competition from several new arrivals. Some examples include Binance’s BinanceUSD (BUSD) and Huobi’s HuobiUSD (HUSD). HUSD managed to grow its market cap by 48.09% since the start of the year, while BUSD skyrocketed by 553.11%.

As for PAX, it remains one of the rare stablecoins that experienced a decline of their market cap. PAX’s market cap dropped by 21.3% YTD.