03-11-2026 
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Stablecoin issuer Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) is having a better year than the overall digital asset sector, but will AI agents offer additional growth opportunities or unleash economic mayhem?
- Circle off to roaring start in 2026
- AI agents + digital assets: convenience or chaos?
- Aon settles insurance payments in USDC/PYUSD
- Block’s Dorsey doesn’t like stablecoins crashing his BTC party
- Coinbase presses U.K. for stablecoin rewards
Circle’s USDC stablecoin has seen its market cap grow by more than $2.3 billion over the past seven days and by nearly $5.9 billion in the past 30 days. That’s far more impressive growth than that experienced by USDT, the market-leading stablecoin issued by Tether, which has risen by $300 million over the past week while falling by ~$500 million over the past month.
Mind you, USDT’s market cap is currently just under $184 billion, while USDC is (as of Tuesday evening) less than half that sum at $78.7 billion. But other metrics suggest that USDC’s growth will likely continue given its role as the lingua franca of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and (increasingly) agentic AI.
Token Terminal recently shared stats showing USDC transfer volume on the Ethereum network topping $1.7 trillion in February, up 250% year-on-year. Different stats from blockchain data researchers Allium show overall stablecoin transaction volume hitting a record $1.8 trillion in February, with $1.26 trillion (~70%) of this attributed to USDC, more than twice the total attributed to USDT ($514 billion, ~28.5%).
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino appeared to push back on these numbers in a March 8 tweet in which he shared Tether’s interpretation of data showing less than 5% of USDT’s ‘total send volume’ in the 12 months ending January 31 was attributable to the token’s ‘single largest sender.’ Tether further claimed that the single largest sender of an unspecified ‘other stablecoin’ represented 23.3% of that token’s total send volume.
Ardoino said this discrepancy showed that USDT is “the digital dollar made for the people,” referencing the “more than 550M users across emerging markets [who] rely on Tether USDT.”
Ardoino’s ‘single largest sender’ stat for that unnamed stablecoin is likely a reference to the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange, Circle’s former USDC partner that relies on USDC for one-fifth of its revenue (and somehow makes more money off USDC than Circle).
On Monday, Coinbase’s chief business officer Shan Aggarwal tweeted that the exchange was “the distribution engine driving USDC growth, with record balances across Coinbase products (+$17.8B as of end of Q4).”
Circle’s share price is up ~49% since the year began and up over 71% since the company made its Nasdaq debut last June. The stock got a further boost (+5.6% to $118.15) on Tuesday after Bernstein analysts called Circle “a long-term category winner” due to its “regulatory edge, strategic partnerships, liquidity headstart and technology stack” that rivals will find hard to match.
AI agents are standing by to take your money and do… something
Ardoino might have been on to something with his claim that USDT was “made for the people,” as USDC is quickly becoming known as the stablecoin of choice among the un-people known as AI agents.
Circle execs have been circulating stats showing AI agents processing 140 million payments over the past nine months, and while the total volume of these payments is a modest $43 million (average transaction: $0.31), USDC accounted for 98.6% of these payments.
Tether isn’t surrendering just yet, recently promoting its USDT-focused Stable network as a place “where agents operate without holding separate gas tokens,” (although they lose points for spelling Stable without the ‘L’ in the accompanying graphic).
Circle has its own Layer-1 payments network (Arc), but this is anything but a two-combatant fight. Also throwing its hat in this ring is payment processor Stripe, which is heavily invested in stablecoin tech following its 2024 acquisition of infrastructure firm Bridge and the subsequent launch of Tempo, Stripe’s Layer-1 stablecoin network.
Bloomberg recently profiled efforts by Circle, Stripe, and others to “build payment systems for a world that doesn’t exist yet,” a reference to the enormous promise but (so far) paltry volume of the agentic AI world. The article notes that stablecoins’ appeal has to date focused on emerging markets where payment infrastructure is underdeveloped and costly, rather than developed markets where customers have an abundance of relatively pain-free payment options.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire acknowledged that getting your AI agent to “buy something on Amazon” wasn’t the goal here. “The real opportunity is all of the things that AIs need to consume from each other.” Micropayments—transactions even smaller than that $0.31 referenced above—are the real opportunity, given the fees charged by traditional rails render such transactions uneconomical.
But agentic AI still has a lot of growing up to do before most consumers will be willing to fork over the keys to a digital wallet. Apart from the ever-present threat of AI ‘hallucinations,’ some experiments have seen AI agents go totally rogue, embarking on activities “without any explicit instruction and, more troublingly, outside the bounds of the intended sandbox.”
In other words, a brave new world is indeed on the horizon, but it isn’t here yet.
Policy matters
Meanwhile, back in meatspace, actual humans continue to explore the boundaries of stablecoin acceptance. On March 9, U.K.-based professional services firm Aon plc announced what it claims is “the first known stablecoin insurance premium payment among major global brokers.”
Aon, the planet’s second-largest insurance broker, said it worked with its clients Coinbase and Paxos to “settle premium payments for their respective insurance programs” using stablecoins. Specifically, USDC and PYUSD—the stablecoin issued by Paxos on behalf of PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL)—are on the Ethereum and Solana networks, respectively.
Aon said using stablecoins for these transactions demonstrated the company’s “commitment to modernizing the insurance value chain.” Tim Fletcher, CEO of Aon’s financial services group, said that “as tokenized instruments become more widely used, clients need confidence that speed and innovation do not come at the expense of control.”
Paxos’ head of treasury and portfolio management, Adam Ackermann, said the payments showed that stablecoins “are not a future concept, but a practical tool financial institutions can use today to modernize settlement and strengthen risk management.”And just think, with insurance premiums for oil shipments from the Middle East soaring due to Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz, isn’t it good to have the ability to quickly top up your coverage 24/7?
Block begrudgingly embraces stablecoins
Among the more telling signs that we all now live in a stablecoin world was last week’s Wired interview with Jack Dorsey, founder of digital payments firm Block (NASDAQ: SQ).
Dorsey, a known BTC bull, was asked whether his company had embraced the token too tightly given its dramatic fall from its all-time price high last October and its subsequent inability to break out of the mid-$60,000 range for longer than a day or two.
In Block’s recent FY25 report, the company’s ‘Bitcoin ecosystem revenue’ fell nearly 18% from 2024, despite this segment now including the first revenue from Block’s new Proto mining rigs.
Dorsey said Block “made a push into Bitcoin because I believe the internet needs an open protocol for money transmission, and Bitcoin represents that protocol the best to me. It’s not controlled by any one company. I don’t like that we’re going to support stablecoins but our customers want to use them. I don’t think it’s wise to go from one gatekeeper to another.”
Last November, Block announced plans to incorporate stablecoins into its Cash App product, making the tokens “interoperable with a customer’s USDC Cash balance.” Block’s Bitcoin Product Lead Miles Suter insisted that Cash App “is—and always will be—bitcoin-first by design,” but stablecoins would be offered “as a complementary option for our customers and an improvement from legacy payment rails.”
Around the same time, Block announced the imminent arrival of Moneybot, the “always on assistant” built into Cash App. Moneybot was pitched as “an AI-powered feature inside Cash App that offers contextual insights and actionable suggestions based on customers’ in-app activity.”
On last month’s earnings call, Block business lead Owen Jennings said the company was “in the process of rolling out our new core payment flow, critically, that’s connected to MoneyBot, and then it also is the flow that is built to support stablecoins, continuing to tweak things there and get that rolled out to 100%.”
Stablecoin ‘reward’ fight crosses the pond
The fight over stablecoin ‘rewards/yield/interest’ has stalled the U.S. Senate’s efforts to pass digital asset market structure legislation for nearly two months now. Coinbase is largely responsible for this impasse, having made its support for the CLARITY Act conditional on guarantees that it can continue to offer rewards to customers holding USDC on the exchange, something U.S. banks staunchly oppose.
While the District of Columbia is where this ‘banks v crypto’ fight has largely played out, Coinbase’s reliance on this reward revenue has the company lobbying hard to prevent similar constraints from taking hold in the United Kingdom.
On March 4, the U.K. House of Lords’ Financial Services Regulation Committee held its latest meeting on the government’s proposed regulation of stablecoins. These plans include (temporary) caps on stablecoin ownership for both individuals and entities, as well as requirements for issuers of ‘systemic’ (aka large) stablecoins to hold 40% of their fiat reserves in “unremunerated Bank of England accounts.”
The Lords’ inquiry, launched in February, previously heard testimony both for and against the government’s plans. Appearing at the March 4 session was Tom Duff Gordon, Coinbase’s VP for International Policy, who played up the boost that a sterling-denominated stablecoin might give to the pound’s role in international finance.
But Duff Gordon had five policy recommendations that Coinbase believes would help the U.K. achieve “a world-beating regulatory system here for stablecoins.” These include scrapping the ownership caps; lowering the 40% cash reserve requirement to, say, 20%; allowing stablecoin use in wholesale settlements; and ensuring that the UK’s rules are compatible with those in other jurisdictions to permit “fungibility and that seamless cross-border transfer.”
The fifth recommendation was what Duff Gordon called the “hotly contested topic” of stablecoin rewards. Coinbase believes rewards “could and should be allowed to be paid by distributors such as Coinbase … to the holders and users of stablecoins.”
Lord Vaux of Harrowden questioned Duff Gordon about where Coinbase gets the money to pay USDC holders, since Circle issues USDC and buys U.S. Treasury bills that support USDC and generate interest.
Duff Gordon said there was “no direct pass-through” of Circle’s interest income to the rewards Coinbase pays its users. Gordon acknowledged Coinbase’s equity stake in Circle, along with the “commercial arrangement where [Circle] will pay us some money that we receive, and we will then promote the usage of USDC on our platform, and that can involve us paying rewards … Our interests are fully aligned.”
In response to a question by Lord Lilley, Duff Gordon said “we honestly do not see a good, strong argument that says you cannot pay rewards, apart from the Bank of England’s contention that this is going to be a transition that will occur too quickly … We think if we want to scale sterling stablecoins, want the City [of London] to be competitive and want a better outcome for consumers with more competition, then we should be allowed to pay rewards on stablecoins as a distributor.”
The deadline for submitting written evidence to the inquiry closed on Wednesday, March 11. Representatives of the Bank of England and blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis were scheduled to appear at this week’s Lords session, while the guest list for the March 18 session has yet to be disclosed.
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