USDT wins users 2.7 to 1, USDC wins the venues: distribution is setting stablecoin share

Set the week against Tether's own recent run rate and it looks less like acceleration. Quarterly additions have been topping 30 million users ^[6], roughly 2.3 million a week across a 13-week quarter, so the past week landed at about 70 percent of that pace ^[3]. The margin over Circle works out to 2.71 to 1 ^[1], nearer to two and a half than to three.

The per-wallet arithmetic is the part worth keeping. Spread the roughly $183 billion of USDT ^[7] across the 650 million holders Tether reported at the end of Q2 ^[5] and the average balance is about $281 ^[4]. The float, meanwhile, is not growing: 184.6 billion tokens were outstanding on June 30 ^[12], which puts mid-August supply around 0.9 percent lower ^[7], in a market that has been contracting since May ^[4]. More holders, slightly less money.

Holders are not the revenue. Tether's roughly $1.5 billion of Q2 net operating profit ^[10] annualizes to about $6 billion, or 3.25 percent of tokens outstanding ^[5], which is what reserves earn rather than what users pay. At that rate the average holder is worth about $9 a year in reserve income ^[9]. Thirty million new wallets a quarter buys distribution and habit. It does not move the income line, which tracks float and short rates.

Circle's advantages sit at the other end of the pipe. Regulated platforms and institutional desks prefer the token that reads well to auditors ^[14], and several European exchanges have tilted toward MiCA-compliant tokens ^[15]. Those are wins where a venue decides what may be listed. Tether's are wins where a person decides what to hold, concentrated in markets where dollar access rather than regulatory pedigree is the binding problem ^[16].

One publisher, one dataset. Crypto Briefing credits iq.wiki for the figures ^[17] and does not say how a holder is counted, and a week of address growth is not a trend. The reserve figure is easier to test: $4.1 billion of excess reserves ^[11] is 2.2 percent of tokens outstanding ^[6], the cushion Tether puts against the long-running question of whether it is backed ^[18], and about 2.7 quarters of current profit ^[8]. Compliance posture is deciding where these tokens may be listed. It is not deciding where they are held, and it is not deciding who earns.