Is your stablecoin funding your competitors? At Spark, we decided it shouldn't.
A digital dollar is a digital dollar, right? Not exactly. While USDC and USDG are both stablecoins pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, backed by US Treasury bills and bank deposits, the way their revenues are distributed tells a completely different story.
And for a DeFi protocol built on Solana like Spark, that difference is strategic.
USDC is issued by Circle and primarily distributed through Coinbase. The reserves backing every USDC are invested in liquid assets (mainly short-term US Treasuries), which generate yield. In 2024, Circle generated approximately $1.7 billion in revenue from these reserves.
The problem? The revenue-sharing structure between Circle and Coinbase, revealed in Circle's IPO filing (S-1), is heavily skewed:
Coinbase receives 100% of the revenue generated on USDC held on its platform, plus 50% of the revenue on all USDC held off-platform (other exchanges, DeFi, wallets). In 2024, that amounted to $908 million paid to Coinbase, roughly 54% of Circle's total revenue. And Coinbase's share is growing: the exchange held 20% of total USDC supply in 2024, up from just 5% in 2022.
In 2025, Coinbase's stablecoin revenue reached $1.35 billion, representing 19% of its total revenue. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates this figure could multiply by seven if USDC adoption in payments accelerates.
Coinbase uses these massive revenues to fuel its broader strategy, including Base, its Ethereum Layer 2 network. Base is now one of the largest L2s, with over $3.7 billion in TVL and nearly one million daily active addresses. Coinbase invests heavily in it: ecosystem funds, developer tools, product integrations, grant programs.
This is not a criticism of Coinbase. It is an observation about strategic alignment. As a protocol built on Solana, every USDC held in our ecosystem generates yield, and a significant portion of that yield directly funds a competing ecosystem. Holding USDC means indirectly contributing to the growth of Base and the Ethereum L2 ecosystem.
For a project that is bullish on Solana, this alignment does not make sense.
USDG (Global Dollar) is issued by Paxos Digital Singapore, supervised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and MiCA-compliant in Europe through Paxos Issuance Europe. Reserves are held at DBS Bank, Southeast Asia's largest bank, in dollar deposits and short-term Treasuries.
On fundamentals, USDG offers the same security guarantees as USDC: 1:1 backing, high-quality liquid reserves, regular attestations.
The fundamental difference is the economic model. USDG redistributes approximately 97% of network revenue to partners in the Global Dollar Network (GDN), based on their contributions to adoption and liquidity. Unlike USDC, where revenues flow to Circle and Coinbase, with USDG the money goes back to those who build and use the stablecoin.
GDN now includes over 100 partners, among them Robinhood, Kraken, OKX, Galaxy Digital, Anchorage Digital, Visa, Mastercard, SwissBorg, and Spark. USDG's market cap surpassed $1 billion in December 2025. It is available on Solana, Ethereum, Ink, and X Layer.