Ethena’s synthetic-dollar stablecoin USDe experienced one of its sharpest monthly contractions to date, while fiat-backed stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, and PYUSD attracted billions in inflows.
CoinGecko data revealed that Ethena’s USDe stablecoin fell from a market capitalization of $9.3 billion on November 1 to a valuation of $7.1 billion on November 30. The token saw approximately $2.2 billion in redemptions, marking a 24% decline in supply during November.
Ethena’s USDe is a synthetic stablecoin that maintains its dollar peg through trading strategies involving crypto and futures contracts, rather than holding actual dollars. This means that USDe outflows indicate users are either selling USDe on the open market, withdrawing from pools, or unwinding their positions on decentralized applications (DApps).
At the time of writing, CoinGecko data shows that the overall stablecoin market cap stands at $311 billion. The market remains dominated by US dollar stablecoins, capturing $303 billion of the sector’s total valuation.
USDe Outflows Follow October Depeg
The USDe's November contraction occurred weeks after the synthetic stablecoin suffered a depegging event on the crypto exchange Binance. At the time, USDe briefly plunged to $0.65 on the exchange.
Ethena founder Guy Young stated that the drop was attributed to a Binance-specific oracle issue and not a problem with USDe’s underlying collateral mechanism that backs the asset.
Young further explained that the USDe token’s minting and redemption functions operated “perfectly” during the incident, with approximately 2 billion tokens redeemed across decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
On October 9, the USDe market cap hovered at $14.8 billion, positioning it as the third-largest stablecoin at that time. Since then, the stablecoin has lost over 53% of its market capitalization.
At the time of writing, CoinGecko data indicates that USDe has a total valuation of $6.9 billion, dropping to the fourth spot in the stablecoin market cap rankings.
Fiat-Backed Stablecoins Grew by $3.2 Billion in November
While the synthetic-dollar stablecoin faced challenges during the month, fiat-backed stablecoins recorded modest but steady gains over the same period.
Tether’s USDt (USDT) saw a $1.3 billion increase to $184.6 billion, while Circle’s USDC climbed to $76.5 billion, adding approximately $600 million to its supply.
PayPal USD (PYUSD) demonstrated the strongest growth among the major dollar-pegged stablecoins, jumping from $2.8 billion to $3.8 billion in November. This represents an inflow of $1 billion for the month, a 35% month-on-month growth.
DefiLlama data showed that since September, when it had a market cap of $1.2 billion, the PayPal PYUSD stablecoin has grown by over 216%. This signifies a $2.6 billion increase in just three months.
Meanwhile, Ripple’s (RLUSD) stablecoin, which breached a market capitalization of $1 billion for the first time in November, continued its growth throughout the month.
According to CoinGecko, RLUSD increased from a $960 million market cap on November 1 to a market cap of $1.26 billion on November 30, marking a $300 million increase.