(Bloomberg) -- Circle Internet Financial’s stablecoin has this year overtaken Tether’s as the market leader in transaction volume, according to data compiled by Visa Inc.

Visa’s adjusted stablecoin metric, which it produced in partnership with Allium Labs, aims to reflect the state of the stablecoin market less any “potential distortions that can arise from inorganic activity and other artificial inflationary practices,” the company said on the new dashboard’s website.

The data shows Circle’s USDC eating up market share since the start of 2024, recording $456 billion in transaction volume last week compared with $89 billion for Tether’s USDT. USDC also accounted for 50% of total transactions since January. Visa, which partnered with Circle in 2020, didn’t explain what prompted the uptick in USDC usage. 

The findings defy expectations, as Tether’s USDT is routinely presented as the industry’s dominant stablecoin thanks to a 68% share of coins in circulation relative to USDC’s 20%, DefiLlama data shows. 

Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter, said that “USDT is more held outside the US as a dollar-based store of value, while the USDC is used in the US as a transaction currency,” which may explain the findings. Tether did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that aim to maintain a steady price in line with a fiat currency, typically the US dollar. They help traders to move funds in and out of tokens, and are also used in payments for purposes including cross-border remittances. 

While data on stablecoin transactions is available on public blockchains, it is often difficult to interpret as “stablecoins can be used across a range of use cases with transactions that can be initiated manually by an end user or programmatically through bots,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa wrote in a blog on Thursday. 

When cleansed of trades linked to bots, total transfer volume over the 30 days prior to April 24 fell from $2.65 trillion to $265 billion.

The findings come after Circle found itself caught up in the US banking crisis last year. 

The total value of USDC in circulation fell from a high of $56 billion to $23 billion in December 2023, after Circle revealed it had a $3.3 billion exposure to Silicon Valley Bank, the ill-fated lender. That figure has rebounded to $32.8 billion today, DefiLlama data shows. 

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