Can USDC & USDT be dethroned?

Together, they account for 88.3% of the stablecoin market.

In third place, there is Ethena's $USDe, which is steadily growing.

On ByBit, traders are earning ~11% APY by using USDe as collateral instead of USDC or USDT (which offer 0% APY).

The yield component has played a key role in USDe's growth on the exchange, as the balance has reached approximately $500 million, only behind USDT.

Going forward, I expect CEX partnerships to keep growing in importance as the stablecoin space becomes more crowded.

See Circle, for instance, who's paying $60 million (+ revenue sharing) to Binance for their distribution deal.

Another thing is user behavior. Everyone will become more exigent as the space matures and at some point, the built-in yield will be mandatory to acquire and retain users.

Given those trends, I think @ethena_labs has a big chance to gain market share by repeating the ByBit playbook and integrating USDe across other major exchanges.

CEXs will be forced to provide users with yield, as @Bybit_Official is doing, and Ethena can provide that, thus expanding its distribution channels.

Below, I made some quick projections, using USDe’s current 8.7% market share on ByBit as "base case".

(Total stablecoin balances here include only USDT and USDC; data via @DefiLlama.)

In an optimistic scenario where Ethena can gain 15% of the market share on these four major exchanges, the USDe balance on CEXs could reach around $7.5 billion, representing a 1,400% increase from the current situation (all calculations exclude other venues).

Fyi, USDe's total supply is currently $5.9 billion, indicating a huge margin of growth if Ethena can secure these deals.