Dominance of Tether and Circle is a net bad for stablecoins, says Bridge executive

Finance Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email Dominance of Tether and Circle is a net bad for stablecoins, says Bridge executive Circle and Tether are going to make it harder for stablecoins to feel like money, said Ben O'Neill, head of money movement at Bridge. By Ian Allison | Edited by Stephen Alpher May 6, 2026, 9:11 p.m. 2 min read Make preferred on Ben O'Neill, head of money movement at Bridge What to know : The two major stablecoin issuers have pros and cons, and neither works for every use case, said Bridge's Ben O'Neill. The solution, he said, is to build more stablecoins for specific use cases so they can be optimized. Miami Beach — The stablecoin universe, dominated by Tether and Circle, hampers competition that could lead to better product-market fit for some important use cases, according to Ben O'Neill, Bridge’s head of money movement. “I think it's a net bad for the growth of stablecoins as a whole, because you have two counterparties that have pros and cons to what they've built, and the design choices they've made. But they don't work for every use case,” O'Neill said on a panel about stablecoin growth at Consensus Miami. Tether’s USDT, with its gargantuan market capitalization of approximately $189.5 billion, and Circle’s USDC, which has grown to around $71 billion, each emerged at different generational eras in the crypto evolution. Tether, launched in 2014 as Realcoin, won the Chinese export trade, O'Neill said, and built this shadow economy of dollars that people can use without the U.S. financial system. Circle, launched in association with Coinbase in 2018, sought to do the exact opposite: a U.S.-regulated stablecoin, which later leaned hard into decentralized finance (DeFi). For O'Neill, the perspective of a large payments firm, such as Bridge-owner Stripe, illustrates the shortcomings of the two dollar-pegged token giants. “As a payments company, I need certainty on how things are going to work,” he said. “So with Tether, they say we'll burn for 10 bips, which is crazy expensive for a payments company, or you can trade on the open market, which means I have no certainty.” “For Circle, their whole business is AUM, and they keep kind of notching up those burn fees. So again, if I'm someone like Visa, and I want to do trillions of dollars of card settlement and stablecoins, I'm burning a bunch of USDC, and that's gonna be a net bad,” O'Neill said. The solution, “which needs to come pretty quickly over the next couple of years,” is more stablecoins built for specific use cases, so they can be optimized for those use cases. The other part is the rise of the clearing house, “a sexy topic for founders and VCs” to make it “as efficient as possible swapping between stablecoins,” he added. Closing out his argument, O'Neill said, “You need more competition, otherwise [Tether and Circle] are going to just keep upping the fees. They're not gonna share the yield. They're gonna disincentivize you from burning it. They're gonna make it harder and harder to make it feel like money at each turn.” More For You Hut 8 shares jump over 30% on news of $9.8 billion AI data center lease By Olivier Acuna | Edited by Jamie Crawley 6 hours ago Bitcoin miner expands into AI infrastructure with long-term hyperscale contract in Texas, which includes options that could increase the total value of the agreement to over $25 billion. What to know : Hut 8 shares jumped nearly 30 percent after the company announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for a large-scale AI data center project at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, with options that could lift the total value to about $25.1 billion. The former bitcoin-mining campus has been repositioned for... Read full story Latest Crypto News Anthropic signs Elon Musk's SpaceX for Colossus 1 compute ahead of June IPO 2 hours ago Eric Trump takes shot at JPMorgan rethinking bitcoin after 'crapping' on asset 3 hours ago The time is now: the Senate must act on crypto market structure legislation 3 hours ago Bermuda pushes stablecoin payments with USDC airdrop as it courts crypto firms, regulators 3 hours ago Crypto bill won't move without a ban on officials' industry ties, says U.S. Senator Gillibrand 4 hours ago The end of ads: Coinbase engineer says AI agents could kill the internet’s favorite business model 4 hours ago Top Stories Bullish’s Equiniti deal could remake it into a tokenization powerhouse, Clear Street says 8 hours ago Bitcoin moves above $82,000 while ZEC and DASH post double-digit rallies 10 hours ago Morgan Stanley brings crypto trading with lower fees than rivals 8 hours ago Consensus Miami Day 2: Real-time coverage and highlights from on the ground 6 hours ago Crypto derivatives have converged with Wall Street. Equity perps could soon prove it. 13 hours ago Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says Clarity better than chaos as Senate hits key moment May 5, 2026