The co-founder and CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire, has made a bold prediction that the company-issued stablecoin is on rail to surpass payments behemothic PayPal in terms of transacted dollar value.

The comments came in a tweet on Tuesday, in which Allaire alluded to the on-chain transaction volume for USD Coin (USDC) over the past year, which he reported as over half a trillion dollars.

He added that this was already about half of the total payment volume for PayPal in 2020, hinting that a "flippening" could be coming shortly.

As some respondents to the tweet noted, the two things are not necessarily comparable, every bit transactions on PayPal are used to pay for goods and services whereas USDC is primarily used on crypto exchanges for trading and speculation. But information technology does help put USDC's growth spurt into perspective.

According to Statista, PayPal's almanac transaction volume was $936 billion for  2020, up 31.5% from the previous twelvemonth, which saw $712 billion transacted. In the fourth quarter of 2020, PayPal's net payment volume amounted to around $277 billion, representing 39% year-on-twelvemonth growth.

In comparison, the market's ascendant stablecoin Tether (USDT) had hitting $600 billion in cumulative transaction book by mid-October 2020 and reportedly topped $780 billion by the end of the year. Daily volumes began to ramp up for stablecoins in the 4th quarter of 2020 as the balderdash marketplace gathered momentum.

Messari currently reports adapted daily volumes at $2.5 billion for USDC and $9.8 billion for USDT. In terms of circulating supply, Tether is currently at a record high of 43.3 billion USDT, according to Tether'due south transparency report, while USDC has eleven.3 billion in circulation, having grown 1,500% since the same time terminal year.

Tether is currently ranked the 5th cryptocurrency overall in terms of marketplace cap co-ordinate to CoinGecko, falling back post-obit XRP's 23% daily pump and Binance Coin'south (BNB) all-time high today. USDC is farther downwards the list but is notwithstanding the second-largest stablecoin in terms of market cap, ranked at 14th, merely beneath Stellar (XLM).