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When Donald Trump paired his Solana memecoin with USDC, the Solana network’s stablecoin supply predictably shot upwards — creating 306 days of supply growth over a long weekend, as we put it in this newsletter.
Although much of this supply growth stemmed from a memecoin that had about 48 hours of relevance, Solana’s stablecoin supply is still near its all-time high. On February 11, Solana had $12.4 billion in stables. Today, it has $12.1 billion.
“Definitely it has been stickier than anticipated,” Blockworks Research analyst Carlos Gonzalez Campo said of Solana’s stablecoin supply when I asked him about it on the Lightspeed podcast this week.
The stablecoin supply growth means Solana’s liquidity is deeper now, Gonzalez Campo said, noting the stickiness could be partly a result of bear market conditions where users are swapping out of riskier tokens to hold stablecoins on Solana apps instead. He also noted how USDC borrows on Solana money market Kamino are around all-time highs, which he interpreted as meaning investors are leveraging up on long SOL exposure following its recent price slide.
Solana is also seeing an accelerating number of new stablecoin brands joining the network. One such example is USDG, a new stablecoin from Paxos with backing from partners including Robinhood, Galaxy Digital and Standard Chartered. The token has a little over $100 million in supply on Solana.
