Circle Reports 30% Growth in USDC Custody on Kraken

Inside Circle's Kraken case study

Circle reported on Oct. 28 that USDC assets under custody on Kraken have grown 30% since the two companies formalized their partnership in September 2025. The issuer put the numbers in a case study published in a post on X, which also credits the collaboration with nearly 1 billion EURC traded on the exchange since the euro token's listing and 350 million USDC deposited into Kraken's DeFi Earn vaults after launch. The USDC price remains anchored to its 1:1 dollar peg, so the disclosure is a distribution story rather than any repricing of the token itself.

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Assets under custody measures the balances clients hold on the venue, meaning the 30% reading captures tokens parked for trading, funding and onchain yield rather than one-off turnover. The EURC figure is turnover: cumulative euro-token volume on Kraken since listing has passed a level that exceeds the token's entire circulating supply as of mid-August, when the issuer reported roughly €400 million outstanding. The deposit figure is the newest of the three and the most literal measure of product adoption, because Kraken's DeFi Earn did not exist before Jan. 26, 2026. None of the three numbers carries a separate Kraken tally; they come from Circle's own accounting of its September 2025 USDC partnership with the exchange. The post describes a collaboration spanning funding, trading, wallet infrastructure and onchain access, with Kraken using USDC and its euro counterpart EURC to reduce fragmentation across the platform and give customers more direct access to dollar- and euro-denominated services. In Circle's framing, the work moves stablecoins into products customers already use, instead of asking them to adopt separate instruments. For the largest dollar stablecoin, which competes with Tether's USDT across centralized venues, custody growth at a single top-tier exchange is one of the few partnership metrics an issuer can publish without exposing customer-level data.

The arrangement dates to Sept. 17, 2025, when Kraken agreed to deepen USDC support and introduce EURC, with reduced conversion fees and broader use of the dollar token across its applications. The exchange said at the time that it had offered stablecoins since 2017 and had seen demand develop across trading and payments. Mark Greenberg, then global head of Kraken's consumer business, described the tokens as “Permissionless, programmable, and global by default” and said the deal would embed Circle's assets in products Kraken clients already used.

DeFi Earn, the product behind the deposit figure, launched on Jan. 26, 2026, letting customers allocate cash and supported stablecoins to onchain lending through Kraken's existing interface, an automated take on yield farming. Deposits are converted into USDC before being placed in Veda vaults that supply lending protocols, with Sentora named risk manager and a choice between Balanced Yield, Boosted Yield and Advanced Strategies allocations. Aave Labs separately described the flow: deposits enter a vault on Kraken's Ink network that feeds liquidity pools on lending markets such as Aave, where borrower payments build vault share value, while users track rewards across mobile and the Krak wallet without handling seed phrases. Launch availability covered 48 US states, excluding New York and Maine, plus Canada and the European Economic Area; a support FAQ updated Oct. 15 lists the UK, Australia and the UAE as unavailable. Supported deposits include cash, USDC, USDT, USDG and Bitcoin, converted into the selected vault's base asset with fees shown before confirmation.

The euro numbers sit inside a wider expansion. EURC's supply passed €400 million in August, with €402.4 million outstanding as of Aug. 13 per the issuer's figures, after more than doubling from roughly €80 million at the end of 2024. Native issuance began on Ethereum in June 2022 and later reached Avalanche, Stellar, Solana and Base, with listings on Bitpanda, Bitstamp, Bybit, Coinbase and Kraken. The euro-sector contest is already documented elsewhere: USDC took 56% of euro stablecoin trading from Tether this year, and Coinbase plans to convert 14 stablecoins into USDC for its EEA users from Oct. 30. Kraken's Jan. 20 support notice adds one more EEA use: margin extensions on dollar-quoted pairs run on USDC and euro-quoted pairs on EURC, converted one-to-one without a fee.

Read together, the three figures describe a distribution strategy rather than a supply event. Custody growth on one venue does not by itself move USDC's aggregate circulation, which Circle reports separately, but it shows where balances are forming: an exchange that converts idle cash and other tokens into USDC before allocating them to onchain lending. The 350 million deposit number is the most concrete of the set, because it measures a product that did not exist ten months ago, and it extends utility beyond retail trading alongside Circle's USDC Match, which pairs institutional mints and redemptions in hourly auctions. The Oct. 28 case study is the first quantitative disclosure Circle has attached to the partnership, and its format points to further updates as DeFi Earn and EURC scale.