USDC Dominated Trading Volume on Decentralized Exchanges Amidst Depegging Incident

On Saturday, several centralized crypto trading platforms and payment processors stopped USDC auto conversions. However, USDC experienced a significant trading volume on decentralized exchange (dex) platforms such as Uniswap, Curve, and Pancakeswap. Uniswap alone recorded $10.13 billion in trades over the past day, with more than 55% of those swaps involving USDC against wrapped ether, and the stablecoin tether. During the last 24 hours, USDC emerged as the most dominant trading pair on dex platforms.

Based on statistics, the stablecoin usd coin (USDC) recorded $26.73 billion in global trade volume during a 24-hour period. On Saturday, USDC depegged from the U.S. dollar, reaching a low of $0.877 per coin. As a result, crypto firms such as Binance, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Bitpay paused USDC payments and auto conversions.

However, despite centralized exchanges halting USDC conversions, the stablecoin accounted for 29% of the $90.70 billion in 24-hour global crypto trades. According to statistics from coingecko.com, over the last day, $15.66 billion was settled on dex trading platforms, with $10.13 billion of that amount resulting from trades on Uniswap version three (v3).



The two most dominant trading pairs on Uniswap were USDC/WETH and USDC/USDT, with USDC swaps with wrapped ether accounting for $2.92 billion, and USDC trades with tether equating to $2.69 billion. Together, USDC/WETH and USDC/USDT represented 55.48% of all trades on Uniswap v3 on Saturday.

USDC/DAI accounted for 5.8% of Uniswap v3’s trades, amounting to $587 million in volume. Additionally, USDC saw numerous other trades with various crypto assets listed on the dex platform. On Curve’s Ethereum-based dex, $179 million in USDC/DAI swaps occurred during the day. USDC was a prominent Curve pair with several other stablecoins like USDT, FRAX, GUSD, MIM, among others.

Curve 3pool share is the bellwether of crypto sentiment💥

During today's USDC depeg, ppl panic sold USDC & DAI for USDT. USDT share in 3pool collapsed to 2%

Ironically, when Tether FUD happened during Terra crash & FTX collapse, USDT was the "infamous" & left 85% in 3pool🤔 pic.twitter.com/VNo3ykxiob

— Panda Jackson (@pandajackson42) March 11, 2023

Curve’s 3pool experienced a decrease in its share of USDT to 2% as traders sold USDC during the depegging incident. On Saturday, the dex platform Pancakeswap v2 recorded $265,888,470 in trading volume, with USDC/BUSD being the most traded pair out of 3,554 trading pairs. $59.95 million, or 22.55% of the trades, were USDC/BUSD swaps.

Pancakeswap’s Stableswap saw $250,361,665, with USDC/BUSD pairs accounting for 44.72% or $111.95 million of the swaps. Uniswap v2 processed $152,276,446 in swaps on Saturday, with USDC pairs once again topping the list of v2 trading pairs. USDC trades with wrapped ether on Uniswap v2 represented 32.95% of the dex’s volume, and 14.80% of the swaps were USDC/USDT.



While dex platforms generated a significant amount of volume from USDC trades, centralized exchanges also witnessed a considerable number of USDC swaps on Saturday. Metrics indicate that Binance recorded $582.97 million in USDC trades against USDT, and Kraken saw $476 million in USDC/USD trades.

Kucoin registered $269.80 million in USDC/USDT swaps, and Kraken’s USDC trades with tether (USDT) amounted to $235 million. Kraken saw another $80.43 million in USDC trades with bitcoin (BTC), and another $78.32 million of USDC/EUR swaps. Of the $26.73 billion in USDC swaps on both dex platforms and centralized exchanges, each USDC swap was for $0.975 or less, depending on the hour of the day.

What are your thoughts on the USDC swaps and trading volume from Saturday? Share your opinions in the comments section below.