Author | @Dune
Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Translator | DingDang (@XiaMiPP)
Editor's Note: While the market is still accustomed to using "total supply" to summarize the stablecoin world, a set of more granular data is revealing another layer of reality. A single supply figure can only answer "how much," but it cannot explain "who is holding," "how it flows," or "why it stays." When we observe supply scale, holding concentration, on-chain circulation velocity, and specific activity categories on the same map, what we see is no longer a static stock, but a dynamic structure of how capital migrates, settles, leverages, and reprices on-chain.
This perspective is important because it may correct our intuitive judgments of the past year. The crypto market's downturn and the strong performance of U.S. stocks form a stark contrast. The panic amplified by whale sell-offs and price retracements easily leads to the belief that capital is fleeing the crypto world. However, the on-chain data presented in this article, along with signals from Circle's recent financial report, suggest that the funds may not have disappeared; they might have just temporarily withdrawn from high-volatility risk assets. At the very least, on-chain data proves they are entering incentive-based activities rather than being used for trading demand.
Everyone quotes that supply number. It appears in every report, every earnings call, and every policy hearing. But beyond "a circulating scale of over $300 billion," how much do we really know about stablecoins?
Who is holding them? How concentrated are the holdings? How fast do they circulate, and on which chains are they primarily active? What are they actually used for—as DeFi liquidity, payment tools, or simply "cash equivalents" for parking funds?
Meta just announced plans to integrate third-party stablecoin payments into its platform; the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) approved a national trust bank charter for Stablecoin; Payoneer announced stablecoin functionality for 2 million businesses; Anchorage Digital launched compliant stablecoin services for non-U.S. banks. Institutions and regulators are accelerating their entry, and the answers they need clearly go beyond just a supply number.
We used the latest stablecoin dataset released by Dune—developed in collaboration with Steakhouse Financial—to answer some of these questions. Here are the results revealed by the data.
Supply Overview
As of January 2026, the fully diluted supply of the top 15 stablecoins on EVM, Solana, and Tron reached $304 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%. Tether's USDT ($197 billion) and Circle's USDC ($73 billion) still dominate with an 89% market share.
Looking at chain distribution, Ethereum carries $176 billion (58%), Tron $84 billion (28%), Solana $15 billion (5%), and BNB Chain $13 billion (4%). Even though the total supply has nearly doubled, this on-chain distribution structure has seen almost no significant change over the past year.
But beneath the top two stablecoins, 2025 was a year of challenger growth. USDS (Sky/MakerDAO) grew 376% to $6.3 billion; PYUSD (PayPal) grew 753% to $2.8 billion; RLUSD (Ripple) jumped from $58 million to $1.1 billion, a staggering increase of 1803%; USDG expanded 52 times; USD1 grew from zero to $5.1 billion.
Of course, not all challengers moved in the same direction. USD0 fell 66%; Ethena's USDe nearly tripled at its October peak, ending the year up 23%. Even so, the number of competitors in the layer below USDT and USDC has increased significantly.
Who is Holding Them?
Most stablecoin datasets can only tell you the total supply. Because our dataset tracks balances at the wallet level and incorporates address labels, we can answer a more critical question: Who is holding these stablecoins?
In the EVM and Solana ecosystems, centralized exchanges are currently the largest identified category, holding $80 billion, up from $58 billion a year ago. Stablecoins are, first and foremost, the infrastructure for exchange trading and settlement.
Whale wallets hold $39 billion; holdings in yield protocols almost doubled to $9.3 billion, reflecting the growth of on-chain yield strategies; issuer addresses—including treasuries and minting/burning contracts—jumped from $2.2 billion to $10.2 billion, a 4.6x increase, directly reflecting the scale of new supply entering the market.
Regarding label quality: Only 23% of the supply is in completely unidentified addresses. For on-chain data, this is a fairly high identification rate—and it is crucial for understanding where stablecoin risk is actually distributed.
172 Million Holders, But Extremely Concentrated
As of February 2026, a total of 172 million unique addresses hold at least one of these 15 stablecoins. USDT accounts for 136 million, USDC for 36 million, and DAI for 4.7 million. The distribution of these three stablecoins is very broad: The top 10 wallets hold only 23%–26% of the supply, with an HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, where 0 represents perfect dispersion and 1 represents a single holder) below 0.03.
Other stablecoins present a completely different picture. The top 10 wallets often control 60% to 99% of the supply. Taking USDS as an example, although its circulating scale is $6.9 billion, 90% of it is concentrated in 10 wallets (HHI 0.48). USDF's concentration is even higher, with the top 10 addresses holding 99% of the supply (HHI 0.54). As for USD0, it almost reaches an extreme: also 99% concentrated in the top 10 wallets, but the HHI is as high as 0.84, meaning even within these top ten, the supply is dominated by one or two addresses.
This does not mean these stablecoins are inherently flawed—some projects are relatively young, and some are designed from the outset for institutional clients. But it does mean their "supply" numbers cannot be interpreted in the same way as USDT or USDC. Holding concentration directly impacts de-pegging risk, liquidity depth, and whether the so-called "supply scale" represents real organic demand or merely reflects the allocation behavior of a few large holders. This kind of analysis is only possible when you have the balance data for every holder, not just the aggregate supply derived from minting/burning events.
January 2026: Transfer Volume $10.3 Trillion
In January 2026, the total transfer volume of stablecoins within the EVM, Solana, and TRON ecosystems reached $10.3 trillion, more than double that of January 2025.
The on-chain distribution contrasts sharply with the supply structure: Base led with $5.9 trillion, despite having a supply of only $4.4 billion; Ethereum had $2.4 trillion; Tron had $682 billion; Solana had $544 billion; BNB Chain had $406 billion.
By token, USDC dominated with $8.3 trillion—almost 5 times that of USDT ($1.7 trillion)—despite its supply being only about 1/2.7 of the latter. USDC clearly circulates faster and more frequently. DAI had $138 billion, USDS had $92 billion, and USD1 had $43 billion.
It's important to emphasize that this data is deliberately kept objective and neutral. The dataset does not pre-filter "real" economic activity based on a fixed standard, so the total volume may include flows generated by automated behaviors such as arbitrage, bots, and internal routing. Instead of hard-coding judgments into the data, we provide an objective perspective, allowing users to choose their own filtering methods—whether to exclude bot transactions, identify organic usage, or define transaction activity metrics that better reflect actual conditions.
What Are Stablecoins Actually Doing?
This is where the granularity advantage of this dataset truly shines. Transfers are not simply labeled as "amount" but are categorized into different activity types based on the on-chain triggering mechanism. This means we not only know that "$10 trillion flowed," but also "why it flowed."
1. Market Infrastructure (DEX Trading & Liquidity)
- DEX Liquidity Provision & Withdrawal: $5.9 trillion—The largest application, reflecting the role of stablecoins as base assets for on-chain market making.
- DEX Swaps: $376 billion—Direct trading activity on automated market makers.
Together, these indicate that stablecoins are primarily trading collateral and liquidity infrastructure. Interestingly, the volume is more concentrated in incentive-driven liquidity mining and active capital optimization activities rather than pure trading demand.
2. Leverage & Capital Efficiency (Lending + Flash Loans)
- Flash Loans (Borrow & Repay): $1.3 trillion—Automated arbitrage and liquidation loops.
- Lending Activities (Deposit, Lend, Repay, Withdraw): $137 billion—Represents the on-chain short-term capital efficiency and structured credit layer.
3. On/Off Ramps (CEX & Bridges)
- CEX Flows—Deposits ($224 billion), Withdrawals ($224 billion), Internal Transfers ($151 billion): Total $599 billion.
- Bridge Deposits/Withdrawals: $28 billion—Shows the function of stablecoins as settlement channels between cross-chain and centralized platforms.
4. Issuance Layer (Monetary Operations)
- Issuer Operations—Minting ($28 billion), Burning ($20 billion), Peg Rebalancing ($23 billion), and other operations: Total $106 billion, nearly 5 times the $42 billion from a year ago.
5. Yield Protocols
- Yield Protocol Activity: $2.7 billion—Small in scale, but significant in structured strategies and on-chain asset management.
Overall, 90% of the transfer volume flows through identified activity categories, providing us with a fine-grained view across all layers of the entire on-chain stack.
Velocity: Same Coin, Different Worlds
Daily Velocity (Volume divided by Supply) is perhaps the most overlooked metric in stablecoin analysis. It reveals whether a stablecoin is actively used as a medium of exchange or merely held.
Among the tokens we analyzed, USDC and USDT stand out again, but exhibit different characteristics.
USDC circulates fastest on L2 and Solana. On Base, USDC's average daily velocity reaches an astonishing 14x—driven by high-frequency DeFi activity; on Solana and Polygon, it's about 1x; on Ethereum, it also reaches 0.9x, meaning almost the entire supply turns over nearly every day.
USDT is fastest on BNB Chain and Tron. It reaches 1.4x on BNB Chain, reflecting active trading; on Tron, it's 0.3x, with lower volume but exceptionally stable transaction volume, consistent with its role as a main channel for cross-border payments. On Ethereum, however, USDT is only 0.2x, with over $100 billion of supply mostly sitting idle.
USDe and USDS are slower, but by design. USDe's average daily velocity on Ethereum is only 0.09x; USDS is 0.5x. Both are yield-bearing stablecoins: USDe is often staked as sUSDe to capture收益 from Ethena's delta-neutral strategy; USDS is deposited into Sky's savings rate mechanism to obtain protocol-subsidized yields. Therefore, a large portion of the supply remains in savings contracts, lending markets like Aave, or structured yield loops. Low velocity here is not a flaw but a feature—these assets are designed to accumulate yield, not to circulate frequently.
Chain differences are more important than the token itself. The same PYUSD has a daily velocity of 0.6x on Solana, four times its velocity on Ethereum (0.1x). The same token exhibits completely different usage patterns in different ecosystems.
Supply and transfer volume each tell part of the story, while velocity connects the two—it reveals whether a stablecoin on a particular chain is active infrastructure or sleeping capital.
