USDT vs USDC: Differences in Issuer, Reserve Reports, Depeg History and Exchange Support

USDT and USDC are both stablecoins pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, and on exchanges their prices are almost identical. Behind them, though, are two very different companies: Tether, which issues USDT, is incorporated in El Salvador, while Circle, which issues USDC, holds licences in the US and the EU. This article covers the five USDT vs USDC differences people ask about most, and the ones where outdated information is easiest to find: issuer and regulation, the latest reserve reports, what the reserves hold, past depegs, and support across chains and exchanges.

The short version: USDT is about 2.5 times the size of USDC, and Tron (TRC20) is its home turf; USDC’s reserves are entirely cash and short-term US Treasury assets, and it has EU MiCA authorisation. Tether’s excess reserve ratio is higher (about 2.24% on 30 June 2026), but about a quarter of its assets are gold, secured loans, bitcoin, stocks and other assets whose value moves. Both have depegged noticeably: USDT worst in 2018, USDC in March 2023. By my count using Coin Metrics daily prices, since June 2023 neither has had a single day with a daily price below US$0.997.

This article is a summary of information and not investment advice, and it does not predict the price of any stablecoin or whether one will depeg. Supply, reserve and regulatory figures are official data as of the dates shown (checked on 12 October 2026) and may change. Go by the issuers’ latest published reports.

USDT vs USDC differences at a glance

Sources: issuer and domicile from Tether’s terms of service and Circle’s August 2026 USDC reserve report; supply from the per-chain data on Tether’s transparency page and Circle’s public API, both retrieved on 12 October 2026; the S&P assessments from S&P Global Ratings’ press release of 4 August 2026. Sources for the other figures are in the sections below.

Issuer and regulation: Tether in El Salvador, Circle in the US and the EU

Tether: incorporated in El Salvador, 2025 financial statements audited by KPMG

According to Tether’s terms of service, USDT is issued by Tether International, S.A. de C.V., formerly Tether International Limited, which has moved from the British Virgin Islands to El Salvador.

• Reserve reports: each quarter the accounting firm BDO issues an assurance report under ISAE 3000 (Revised), listed in the reports section of the transparency page.
• Annual audit: on 13 August 2026 Tether announced that KPMG had issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International’s financial statements for 2025 (to 31 December 2025), with reserves exceeding liabilities by US$6.814 billion (Tether press release). This is Tether’s own announcement; I could not find the full KPMG report published anywhere.
• A separate product for the US market: on 27 January 2026 Tether launched USA₮, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. in the US, not by the Tether company that issues USDT (Tether press release). USA₮ and USDT are two different tokens.
• Past penalties: in October 2021 the US CFTC fined Tether US$41 million over its claim that USDT was 100% backed by fiat currency (CFTC); in February 2021 Tether and Bitfinex also settled with the New York Attorney General, with details in “Bitfinex Review”.

Circle: issued by licensed companies in the US and France

According to Circle’s August 2026 reserve report, USDC is issued and redeemed by Circle Internet Financial, LLC and Circle Internet Financial Europe SAS.

• Reserve reports: Circle publishes its reserve holdings and issuance and redemption volumes every week, and each month an accountant issues a report under the AICPA’s attestation standards; Circle’s website says the report comes from one of the Big Four accounting firms (Circle transparency page). The company’s own financial statements are audited by Deloitte.
• US trust bank: on 10 July 2026 the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) gave Circle final approval to set up a national trust bank, First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A. At first it will only hold digital assets in custody for Circle and its affiliates; managing USDC reserves is a function that might be added later (Circle press release).

EU MiCA: USDC is authorised, USDT was delisted on EU exchanges

• USDC: on 1 July 2024 Circle’s French subsidiary obtained an electronic money institution licence from France’s Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR), and USDC and EURC began to be issued in the EU under MiCA (Circle press release). When I downloaded ESMA’s MiCA interim register files (the e-money token list) on 12 October 2026, the USDC and EURC white papers of Circle Internet Financial Europe SAS were both listed.
• USDT: the same register file lists no Tether company at all. On 17 January 2025 ESMA and the European Commission published guidance asking national authorities to make sure, by the end of the first quarter of 2025 at the latest, that crypto-asset service providers no longer provide services for stablecoins that are not authorised (ESMA). For example, from 31 March 2025 Binance delisted spot trading pairs for USDT and 8 other stablecoins for users in the European Economic Area; users can still hold, deposit and withdraw them, or sell them through Convert (Cointelegraph).

The US GENIUS Act: final rules are not out yet

The GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law, was signed into law on 18 July 2025. Under its text it takes effect on the earlier of “18 months after enactment (18 January 2027)” and “120 days after the regulators issue final rules”, so it takes effect on 18 January 2027 at the latest. None of the regulators had issued final rules by the one-year deadline of 18 July 2026, which does not push back the effective date (The Block); the OCC published its proposed rule on 25 February 2026 (OCC). How USDT and USDC will be treated in the US once the act takes effect depends on the final rules, and this article does not speculate.

Reserve reports compared: what backs each one

Latest reserve reports (checked on 12 October 2026)

Tether’s next report is dated 30 September 2026. Going by past publication dates, it usually comes out about a month after the quarter ends (the 30 June report, for example, was published on 31 July). In the previous quarter (31 March 2026), Tether’s excess reserves were US$8.23 billion (Tether press release), so they fell by about half in one quarter.

What the reserves hold

I converted the asset breakdowns in the two reports into shares of total reserves (USDT from the reserve breakdown on Tether’s transparency page, USDC from Circle’s 31 August report):

Figures in US$ billion. USDT’s “cash and cash equivalents” total US$140.64 billion, about 74.9%; the three rows in the table add up to about US$20 million less than that total, which is the part not itemised. USDC’s “bank deposits and cash” includes US$9.59 billion held at regulated financial institutions and US$1.00 billion of cash inside the Circle Reserve Fund, plus a settlement timing adjustment, with pluses and minuses netting to about zero. Most of USDC’s Treasury bills and repos sit in the Circle Reserve Fund (ticker USDXX), a government money market fund managed by BlackRock and regulated under the US SEC’s Rule 2a-7.

My calculation: USDT’s gold, secured loans, bitcoin, other investments, stocks and corporate bonds add up to about US$47.11 billion, about 25.1% of total assets. The US$4.11 billion of excess reserves is about 8.7% of those assets. In other words, under the simplifying assumption that liabilities stay the same, a combined fall of about 8.7% in the value of these assets would wipe out the excess reserves. This is a sensitivity calculation, not a forecast; in practice Tether’s assets and liabilities change every day. USDC’s excess is only 0.11%, but its reserves are entirely short-dated US Treasury assets and bank cash, whose prices move far less. Its risk is concentrated in whether the banks and the fund remain available, which is the kind of risk behind the March 2023 depeg.

How to read Tether’s quarterly reserve report

Tether’s quarterly report (an ISAE 3000R assurance report) is an accountant’s opinion on the asset and liability figures for “one particular day”. It is not an audit of a full year’s financial statements. When you read one, look at these in order:

1. Check the report date and the publication date: the cover or file name shows the report date (for example 30-06-2026), and the press release date is the publication date. When comparing two quarters, line them up by report date.
2. Look at total assets minus liabilities: liabilities are mainly the tokens issued. Total assets minus liabilities is what Tether calls excess reserves, which were US$4.11 billion on 30 June 2026. Divide that by liabilities to get the excess ratio (about 2.24%).
3. Split the assets into two groups: cash and cash equivalents (Treasury bills, repos, money market funds, cash) in one group; gold, bitcoin, secured loans, stocks and other investments in the other. The larger the second group’s share, the more easily the value of the assets moves with the market.
4. Check who the secured loans went to: Tether’s transparency page notes next to secured loans that “none are to affiliated entities”. The CFTC penalised Tether in 2021 because its statements about USDT’s reserves were untrue or misleading.
5. Compare with the previous quarter: look at how excess reserves, bitcoin, gold and secured loans rose or fell. For example, the excess on 30 June was about half of what it was on 31 March; Tether’s press release mentions swings in gold and bitcoin prices that quarter, and secured loans were cut by about US$2.38 billion.
6. Know what it does not cover: an assurance report verifies the figures on the report date. It does not guarantee how the assets will be used afterwards, nor does it mean every asset can be turned into cash within a day. Exchange proof of reserves has the same limits; see “How to Check Proof of Reserves”.

Also note that the total assets and liabilities updated daily on Tether’s transparency page (on 12 October 2026 it showed total assets of about US$189.72 billion and liabilities of about US$184.25 billion) are figures Tether publishes itself, not figures an accountant has assured.

Depeg history: USDT’s worst was in 2018, USDC’s in 2023

The “daily price” is PriceUSD from the Coin Metrics community API: one reference price per day, taken at the end of the day in UTC, so it is much milder than intraday lows. “Back above US$0.99” counts the days from the lowest day until the daily price first returned to 0.99 or above.

Putting together the daily prices from January 2018 to 11 October 2026 shows a clear difference between the two:

• USDT: 90 days with a daily price below US$0.99, 64 in 2018 and 26 in 2019, and not a single day since 2020.
• USDC: since its data begins in September 2018, only one day below US$0.99, 11 March 2023.
• Since June 2023: USDT’s lowest daily price was 0.9977 (4 February 2026), USDC’s 0.9990 (18 May 2025).

This is history and does not mean neither will depeg again. What I see in common across these events is that when the market doubts “whether the reserves are really there and can be accessed right away”, the price drops first and only recovers once the issuer or the authorities give an answer.

Supported networks and exchanges: TRC20 is USDT’s home turf

Supply on each chain (12 October 2026)

Figures in US$ billion. USDT is calculated from the per-chain data on Tether’s transparency page (amounts authorised but not yet issued are excluded), USDC from Circle’s public API. Tether’s list also includes Aptos, Avalanche, Kaia, Celo, Cosmos, Polkadot, Near, Liquid, Tezos and other chains; Circle’s report lists 39 chains, and its website says USDC was natively supported on 38 as of 16 September 2026 (Circle).

A few things stand out in the table:

• TRC20 is almost all USDT: USDT on Tron is about US$93.28 billion, while only about US$28 million of USDC remains. Circle’s report states that Tron is redemption-only, with no new issuance.
• USDC lives mainly on Ethereum and the newer L2s: Ethereum has about 66%, followed by HyperEVM, Solana, Base and Arbitrum.
• BEP20 is not issued directly by either issuer: the BNB row on Tether’s transparency page shows 0 issued, and Circle’s chain list does not include BNB Smart Chain. USDT and USDC on BNB Smart Chain are labelled “Binance Bridged USDT” and “Binance Bridged USDC” on CoinGecko (CoinGecko), meaning versions bridged by Binance.
• Old chains Tether no longer supports: Omni, Bitcoin Cash SLP, Kusama, EOS and Algorand stopped accepting redemptions from 1 September 2025 (Tether’s terms of service); small balances still show for these chains on the transparency page.

USDT withdrawal networks and fees on exchanges

This site’s data file covers USDT withdrawal networks and fees at international exchanges as follows (in USDT; a dash means not supported or not found):

Data checked: 2026-10-08

USDC withdrawal networks and fees vary widely from exchange to exchange, and this site has not compiled them into a data file yet, so go by each exchange’s withdrawal page. The rule is the same whether you send USDT or USDC: check which networks the receiving side supports, pick one that both sides have, and send a small amount first when the amount is large. For the full steps, see “How to Choose a USDT Withdrawal Network”; for each exchange’s recovery rules if you pick the wrong network, see “USDT Sent on the Wrong Network?”.

How to decide between USDT and USDC

Which one to use depends on what you are using it for and which kind of risk you are willing to take:

• Sending to someone else or to a platform: first check which stablecoin and which network the receiving side supports. About half of USDT’s supply is on Tron, while USDC barely circulates on Tron.
• If reserve composition matters to you: USDC’s reserves are entirely short-term US Treasury assets and bank cash; about a quarter of USDT’s are gold, secured loans, bitcoin, stocks and other assets, though its excess reserve ratio is higher (about 2.24%, versus about 0.11% for USDC).
• In the European Economic Area: under ESMA’s guidance, service providers regulated by MiCA can no longer offer services for unauthorised stablecoins like USDT (Binance, for example, delisted its spot pairs); USDC has MiCA authorisation.
• If you want to earn yield on it: whichever one you hold, putting it into exchange earn products, Aave or lending adds platform or protocol risk on top of issuer risk. For a comparison, see “Where to Park Idle USD and USDT”.

With either stablecoin, check the issuer’s latest report regularly: Tether’s every quarter, Circle’s every month. A sharp drop in excess reserves, a late report or a clear rise in the share of volatile assets in the reserves are all worth a closer look.

FAQ

What is the biggest difference between USDT and USDC?

The issuer, the regulation and what backs them. USDT is issued by Tether, which is incorporated in El Salvador; on 30 June 2026 about 75% of its reserves were cash and cash equivalents, and the rest was gold, secured loans, bitcoin and other assets. USDC is issued by Circle's companies in the US and the EU; on 31 August 2026 its reserves were entirely US Treasury repurchase agreements, Treasury bills and bank cash.

Which has more reserves, USDT or USDC?

By excess reserve ratio, Tether's total assets on 30 June 2026 exceeded its liabilities by about US$4.11 billion, about 2.24%; Circle's reserves on 31 August 2026 exceeded USDC in circulation by about US$77.78 million, about 0.11%. But about a quarter of Tether's assets move with the prices of gold, bitcoin and similar assets, while USDC's reserves are all cash and short-term US Treasury assets.

Have USDT and USDC ever lost their peg?

Both have. USDT fell to US$0.85 on Kraken on 15 October 2018 and to about US$0.95 on some exchanges on 12 May 2022. USDC fell to about US$0.88 on 11 March 2023 after Silicon Valley Bank failed, and its daily price was back at about US$0.999 on 13 March.

Can USDT still be used in the EU?

USDT's issuer has no MiCA authorisation. Under ESMA's statement of 17 January 2025, crypto-asset service providers in the EU had to complete their adjustments by the end of the first quarter of 2025 at the latest. From 31 March 2025 Binance delisted USDT spot trading pairs for users in the European Economic Area, though they can still hold, deposit and withdraw it. USDC's issuer, Circle, obtained MiCA authorisation on 1 July 2024.

Can I send USDC on TRC20?

It is not advisable as a normal option. Tron is the chain with the most USDT issued, about 51%, but Circle only processes redemptions on Tron and no longer issues there; on 12 October 2026 only about US$28 million of USDC remained on Tron. When sending USDC, go by the networks listed on the receiving side's deposit page.

Can individuals redeem dollars directly from Tether or Circle?

The bar is high. Tether requires verified customers, with a US$150 verification fee, a US$100,000 minimum redemption and a fee of 0.1% or at least US$1,000, and residents of the US, Canada, Singapore and other places cannot use it. Circle's minting and redemption service, Circle Mint, is open only to institutions; individuals get or sell USDC through exchanges and wallets.