Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) has overtaken the world’s largest stablecoin, Tether’s (USDT), in stablecoin transactions in a surprising turn of events.

USDC saw 166.6 million transactions in April 2024, overtaking USDT’s 163.6 million monthly transactions, according to on-chain analytics by payments giant Visa.

USDC has been eating up the stablecoin transaction market share since the end of 202. In December 2023, USDC’s 145 million monthly transactions flipped USDT’s 127 million transactions for the first time, according to Visa.

The development is a significant surprise for industry participants, considering that Tether is the world’s largest stablecoin by far, with a market capitalization of over $110 billion, accounting for over 68% of total stablecoin market share. 

This makes Tether’s stablecoin over three times larger than Circle’s USDC, which is currently worth $33.5 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Cointelegraph has contacted Tether for comment.

Related: USDT aims to offer a lifeline to inflation-stricken nations: Tether CEO

In terms of total users, Circle’s stablecoin is still far behind Tether’s user count. USDT was used by over 34.2 million unique wallets in April 2024, while Circle’s USDC only saw 9.57 million unique users.

There were a total of 27.3 million unique stablecoin users and 21.4 million unique stablecoin sending addresses in the past 30 days.

The four stablecoins tracked by Visa, which also include the Paxos dollar (USDP) and PayPal USD (PYUSD), recorded over $2.3 trillion in total transaction volume in over 352 million transactions during the past 30 days, according to Visa’s dashboard.

Visa introduced its stablecoin analytics dashboard in April, aiming to cut through the “noise” to provide easily accessible and digestible data on four stablecoins across nine blockchains.

Stablecoins are important, as they enable traders to quickly move in and out of cryptocurrency positions. Stablecoins have a total market capitalization of over $161 billion, which accounts for 6.63% of the total crypto market cap of $2.43 trillion, according to CoinGecko data.

Related: Crypto on track to hit 1 billion users by end of 2025: Analyst