Stablecoin Supply Expands by $5B Since U.S. Election as Investors Pile Into Crypto

• The supply of Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC together grew by $5.4 billion over the past week as demand for crypto liquidity soared after the U.S. election.

• Stablecoins have steady prices and serve as key trading pairs on exchanges; their growth signals capital inflows to the crypto economy and investor demand for digital assets.

• Investors remained on the sidelines heading into the election, then piled into the markets once the results were in, Anagram partner David Shuttleworth said.

Money is piling into the crypto market since the U.S. election, as the rapidly expanding stablecoin supply shows.

Expansion of the stablecoin supply is bullish for digital assets, indicating capital inflows to the crypto ecosystem. Stablecoins have their price anchored to an external asset, predominantly to the U.S. dollar. They are a popular source of liquidity for crypto trading, serving as “dry powder” to buy assets on exchanges. USDT is the most liquid crypto trading pair on off-shore exchanges, while USDC is mostly used on U.S.-focused Coinbase and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

“There was a lot of sidelined interest from both retail and institutions leading up to the election,” David Shuttleworth, partner at Anagram, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Once the results were in, liquidity and buy-side pressure began to pile in.”

One metric that underscores this behavior is the balance of Ethereum-based stablecoins on exchanges. The amount of stablecoins on exchanges declined steadily heading into the election as investors took a “wait-and-see approach”, Shuttleworth said. Then, following Nov. 5 election, stablecoin balances jumped to a yearly high of $41 billion from around $36 billion in early November, Nansen on-chain data shows, as investors deposited stablecoins pent-up demand for crypto assets

The stablecoin growth happened while activity soared across multiple corners of the digital asset economy as bitcoin (BTC) hit record highs on Donald Trump’s election victory, and anticipation of a crypto-friendly regime unleashed animal spirits.

Native USDC supply on the Solana (SOL) network grew 14% over the past week to nearly $2.9 billion, DefiLlama data shows, as Solana-based DeFi protocols saw a resurgence in transaction volumes and network revenues. Meanwhile, USDT supply on the TON (TON) blockchain to a new record of $1.1 billion, up 10% during the same period as users continued to experiment with the budding ecosystem centered around the messaging app Telegram.