Circle pre-mints $1B USDC on Solana as Pyra halts service

Circle pre-minted $1 billion USDC on Solana this week while Pyra, a crypto payments platform affected by the April 1 Drift exploit, stopped new user onboarding and canceled its payment cards. Pyra opened a web portal for withdrawals and private key exports that will remain available until Sept. 15, 2026 and plans to use the same portal to distribute any future Drift recovery tokens once those tokens are finalized.

Pyra’s announcement said new user onboarding is paused and existing payment cards have been canceled. The portal allows users to withdraw assets or export private keys. The company has not provided a timetable, token economics or transferability rules for any recovery payouts.

Blockchain investigators estimated the April 1 Drift exploit at roughly $286 million and linked the attack to a DPRK-affiliated actor. After the attack, Drift’s total value locked fell from about $550 million to under $250 million. Investigators reported that the attacker converted stolen assets to USDC on Solana before bridging funds to Ethereum.

Drift’s recovery update described about $295 million in outstanding user losses and outlined a recovery framework that includes a recovery pool, a separate recovery token and potential support from Tether. Details on timing and the mechanics of any recovery-token distribution remain unresolved.

On-chain trackers reported that Circle’s pre-mint added $1 billion of USDC on Solana and that gross USDC issuance on the chain reached about $3.5 billion over the past seven days. Circle explained that Solana uses pre-mint mechanics, where tokens can exist at a pre-mint address before being authorized for circulation, and that a gross mint report should not be read automatically as net new circulating supply.

Chain-level data showed roughly $14.9 billion in stablecoins on Solana on June 16, with USDC holding near 49.4% share and a seven-day decline in stablecoin market cap of about 3.15%. The Solana Foundation reported that stablecoin supply on the network crossed $16.4 billion in May and that Solana-based perpetuals platforms reached $64.6 billion in monthly volume. Market aggregators place USDC near a $75 billion market capitalization and Solana near $43 billion.

For Pyra customers, the operational facts are clear: the portal is available for withdrawals and private key exports until Sept. 15, 2026, and the platform intends to use that channel for any future recovery token distribution. The company has not issued guidance on how recovery tokens would be valued or transferred.

Open items remaining include the timing and mechanics of any Drift recovery-token distribution, the amount users might recover, and which stablecoin infrastructure will be used for settlement in reimbursement scenarios.