USDC rises in popularity as MiCA regulations disrupt USDT volumes
The first half of 2025 has seen some profound shifts in the European crypto market shaped by evolving regulation, network innovation, and merchant behavior. As a recent H1 2025 crypto payments report by CoinGate suggests, the swift rise of the USD Coin (USDC), largely propelled by the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, is at the center of this transformation. With the introduction of MiCA in late March, Tether (USDT) began vanishing from the payment rails in Europe due to regulatory uncertainty, allowing USDC to step in. Indeed, MiCA-compliant and bolstered by multi-chain availability, USDC saw its transaction volume jump 337% year-over-year and now sits among the five most-used assets on CoinGate. Are stablecoins becoming mainstream? CoinGate’s data suggests that crypto payments are not merely surviving the new regulatory developments but evolving and gaining more mainstream ground. Sure, the impact of the MiCA’s framework was imme...