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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.
May 6, 2026, 9:11 p.m. 2 min read
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.
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.
