USDC USDC

What USDC actually is on-chain

USDC is an ERC-20 deployed on Ethereum, at contract address 0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0ce3606eb48. That address, not the ticker USDC, is what uniquely identifies this asset: anyone can deploy a second token calling itself USDC, but the contract is unforgeable. Verify it against etherscan.io before sending funds or approving a spend.

Because it lives on Ethereum, USDC is held in any EVM-compatible wallet, transfers are paid for in ETH rather than in USDC itself, and secondary liquidity sits in Uniswap-style AMM pools. Two consequences follow for anyone setting alerts: you need ETH in the same wallet to move the token at all, and a quoted price taken from a pool is a pool price — it includes slippage that an order-book quote would not.

For USDC the project publishes a whitepaper and a public source repository. Both a written specification and readable code exist, which is a materially higher bar than most assets in this size range clear. None of it is a quality judgement about the asset; it is simply what can be independently checked before the chart is worth looking at.

Where USDC sits in the market

USDC is ranked #6 by market capitalisation, in the lower half of the top ten. At that size the binding constraints are not liquidity but custody, index membership and regulated venue access — books are deep enough that a retail-sized order almost never moves the printed quote, and the spread between two major venues is usually a few basis points. The trade-off is correlation: USDC is close to the market benchmark itself, so it responds to funding conditions and to flows into the asset class more than to project-level news.

CryptoPingAi is currently streaming 8 live USDC order books (Binance, OKX, Bitget, Gate.io, MEXC, HTX…). That is coverage in line with a #6 ranking: enough books to cross-check a quote, few enough that one of them can dominate price formation for hours at a time. One of them is a Korean won market, so the Kimchi-premium spread between the KRW and USDT quote is visible on this page.

USDC against its all-time high

USDC is 4.0% below the $1.04 record set on 2018-11-15. That is a shallow drawdown: the high itself is the nearest meaningful reference overhead, and the supply that changed hands near it is small enough that a retest is a mechanical question of flow rather than a structural one. Reclaiming the high needs only 1.04x from here. It was set 8 years ago. A reference that old says more about the cycle it belongs to than about the asset as it trades now.

USDC across its historical range

The recorded range is comparatively narrow: 1.19x between $0.8776 and $1.04. Either the price history is short, or the asset is designed not to move.

At 14.1% above its record low of $0.8776 (on 2023-03-11), USDC sits near the edge of its own price history. Nothing has traded beneath that level, so there is no support to reference, no volume shelf and no cost-basis cluster underneath. The low is old enough that it has held as a floor across multiple market regimes, which is a materially different situation from a low being freshly printed.

USDC supply structure

There is no fixed maximum supply for USDC. Total supply stands at 77.91 billion USDC and essentially all of it — 100.0% — is circulating. With no locked treasury to unlock, dilution comes from protocol issuance over time rather than from a cliff on a vesting calendar, which tends to produce slow supply drift instead of discrete unlock shocks. A float measured in the tens of billions also means the unit price is small in absolute terms, so percentage moves matter and round-number levels sit at decimal places most people do not watch — an alert set on a whole-cent boundary will behave very differently here than on a three-figure asset.

What kind of asset USDC is

USDC is pegged to the US dollar, so the only price question that matters is whether the peg holds; trend and momentum readings on a dollar peg describe noise, not direction. Our dataset does not record which backing model this token uses, which is itself worth resolving before holding it: reserve-backed, collateral-backed and algorithmic pegs fail in very different ways and on very different timescales. At a fully diluted value above a billion dollars it is large enough that its peg is defended by deep secondary liquidity, not only by the issuer's redemption promise.

CoinGecko files USDC under 10 categories, including Stablecoins, USD Stablecoin, Solana Ecosystem, Avalanche Ecosystem, Polygon Ecosystem. CoinGecko also records deployments on Solana (3,129 tracked tokens), Avalanche (256 tracked tokens), Polygon (531 tracked tokens), so on-chain liquidity is split across several networks and the cheapest venue depends on which deployment you are trading.

How to set a USDC alert that is worth receiving

USDC is the ERC-20 at 0xa0b8…eb48 on Ethereum — quoted on 8 venues we stream — high dated 2018-11-15 — rank #6. On this profile the condition that carries signal is a peg-deviation band of roughly ±0.5% of par, with RSI ignored entirely.

Full alert-design method: thresholds, RSI/MACD and volume conditions →