TL;DR
- WalletConnect Network processed $155.9 billion in USDC volume during the first half of 2026, distributed across more than one million transactions.
- USDC accounted for 56.1% of the network’s total stablecoin volume, leading both institutional flow and organic retail activity.
- Ethereum Mainnet concentrated $149.51B of the volume, while Base led the transaction count with 366,864 recorded operations.
WalletConnect processed $155.9 billion in USDC volume during the first half of 2026, according to a report published by Saman Nargund, Ecosystem & Marketing Partnerships Lead at the company. The analysis details how the world’s largest stablecoin by regulated market capitalization has become the central asset of the onchain economy, for both institutions and retail users around the world.
The WalletConnect report distinguishes two layers of activity. The first comprises institutional custodians moving volumes at significant scale. The second encompasses more than 1.06 million transactions from self-custody individual users, which generated $6.94 billion in organic volume, excluding institutional flow. Both layers converge on one conclusion: USDC is the asset that users and institutions choose to move, operate, and bridge across chains.
The Preferred Destination of USDC Is the DeFi Sector
The breakdown by use category reveals that decentralized finance absorbs the largest share of the money flow. Institutional movements and retail activity in DeFi totaled $149.79 billion. Prediction markets and artificial intelligence agents ranked second with $4.51 billion, followed by interoperability with $929 million, wallet custody with $444 million, and payments with $197 million.
The wallets that channeled that volume include Fireblocks, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Tangem, SafePal, Uniswap Wallet, Binance Wallet, Ledger Live, OKX Wallet, and Bitget Wallet. Regarding geographic distribution, the United States led both in volume — $143 billion — and in number of transactions, with 129,729 operations. Japan recorded 114,854 transactions despite representing only 0.35% of total volume, which indicates an active retail base with lower average ticket sizes.
WalletConnect: The Weight of USDC in Payments
In the payments sector, 72% of the volume processed through the network corresponds to stablecoins, with USDC as the dominant asset. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, WalletConnect Pay processed more than $2.5 billion on Base, the chain where USDC represents $4.2 billion out of a total stablecoin supply of $4.725 billion. The first production deployment of WalletConnect Pay was alongside Moneda, also on Base.
Circle obtained in July 2026 the final approval from the OCC to operate Circle National Trust, a federal trust bank. On the other hand, the GENIUS Act — enacted on July 18, 2025 — establishes a federal framework requiring reserves in safe assets and will come into effect in January 2027.
