Nearly 3 Billion BUSD Stablecoins Have Been Removed From the Market in 6 Days

Six days ago, a few hours before the blockchain infrastructure platform Paxos announced it would no longer mint BUSD stablecoins, $2.86 billion worth of BUSD were redeemed. Currently, Binance is the most active exchange trading BUSD tokens, and the stablecoin still commands roughly 10.7% of the crypto economy’s $67.71 billion in global trade volume over the past 24 hours.

BUSD Supply Shrinks by 17.77% in 6 Days

Statistics show that a significant amount of BUSD has been redeemed over the past six days, with the supply dropping by 17.77% during that time frame. Over the past 30 days, the supply of BUSD has shrunk by 19.2%. On Feb. 13, 2023, Paxos, the company that issues, manages, and redeems BUSD, announced that it would no longer mint new BUSD going forward.

Redemptions kicked into high gear after Paxos made the announcement, with $290 million being redeemed within eight hours. At the time of the announcement, there was $16.1 billion BUSD in circulation. As of Feb. 19, 2023, there are approximately 13,238,824,118 BUSD in circulation, meaning that the 17.77% of BUSD redeemed accounted for 2.861 billion tokens being removed from the market.

Statistics from Glassnode show the supply at 13.43 billion while coingecko.com statistics show the supply at 13.23 billion.

The blockchain intelligence firm Nansen has been monitoring the Paxos Treasury wallet, which sends millions of BUSD to the burn address, effectively removing the stablecoins from circulation. According to Nansen’s exchange portfolio tool, Binance currently holds 10.9 billion BUSD as of Feb. 19, 2023. Metrics show that BUSD still accounts for $7.24 billion of the day’s $67.71 billion in global trade volume, which represents 10.7% of the total.

Binance dominates most of BUSD’s trading volume, with the stablecoin’s most popular trading pair today being tether (USDT). According to statistics from cryptocompare.com, 5.52% of BUSD volume on Sunday was also paired with the Turkish lira. Although BUSD had the most redemptions in the past 30 days, USDC saw 2.9% of its supply removed during that period.

Notably, Paxos’ other stablecoin, pax dollar (USDP), has seen its supply decrease by 19.3%. A significant amount of pax gold (PAXG) has also been removed, as 11.3% of the circulating supply has been erased in 30 days. In contrast, tether (USDT) has seen its supply increase by 5.8%, resulting in a market capitalization of more than $70 billion.