
Stablecoins are a $300B+ market. But supply is only the surface.
Stablecoins had a consequential week. Bridge secured OCC approval for a national trust charter. Payoneer rolled out stablecoin capabilities to 2M businesses. Anchorage launched compliant minting and settlement infrastructure for non-U.S. banks.
The institutional era is here.
Yet the conversation still revolves around one number: total supply.
That metric shows scale, but it doesn’t show structure. Who holds stablecoins? How concentrated is ownership? Where do they move? And how differently do they behave across chains?
Here’s what the data reveals when you go beyond the headline.
$304B in supply, up 49% YoY. USDT ($197B) and USDC ($73B) still hold 89% of the market. But below them, a wave of challengers emerged in 2025: USDS grew 376%, PYUSD grew 753%, RLUSD grew 1,803%, and USD1 appeared from nowhere at $5.1B.
CEXes are the biggest holders. Across EVM and Solana, centralized exchanges hold $80B in stablecoins (up from $58B a year ago), making them the largest identified category. Whale wallets hold $39B. Yield protocols nearly doubled to $9.3B. Issuer addresses — treasuries and mint/burn contracts — jumped 4.6x from $2.2B to $10.2B, reflecting the surge of new issuance. Only 23% of supply sits in unidentified addresses.
172 million holder addresses (+43% YoY). USDT alone has 136M. USDC has 36M, DAI 4.5M. The newer stablecoins show very different adoption curves, with total unique addresses well below 1M. USD1 has grown from 303K holders in August to 543K. PYUSD went from 34K to 56K. USDG expanded 12x from 3,200 to 41,000 holders. USDtb showed the most impressive growth, jumping from 303 to 293,000 holders.
The concentration gap is stark. Using wallet-level balances, we measured how concentrated each stablecoin's ownership really is, both through the share held by the top 10 wallets and through the HHI (the standard economic concentration index, where 0 is perfectly distributed and 1.0 means a single holder). USDC is the most distributed: top 10 wallets hold 23% of supply, HHI of 0.008. USDT is similar: top 10 at 26%, HHI of 0.014. For every other stablecoin, the picture is very different. USDS, with $6.9B in supply, has 90% in 10 wallets (HHI 0.48). USDF has 99% in the top 10 (HHI 0.54). And USD0 is the most extreme: 99% in the top 10 and an HHI of 0.84, indicating that even within those top holders, supply is dominated by just one or two wallets.
$10T moved in January, 2x YoY. Base led all chains by transfer volume at $5.9T despite holding just $4.4B in supply. USDC did $8.3T in transfers, nearly 5x USDT's $1.7T, despite being 2.7x smaller in supply.
DEX liquidity provisioning dominates flows on EVM and Solana. DEX liquidity accounted for $5.9T (61% of January volume), flash loans $1.3T (14%), CEX flows $599B (6%), and DEX trading $568B (6%). Issuer flows hit $195B, nearly 5x the $42B a year earlier. 90% of all transfer volume flows through identified categories.
Velocity reveals which stablecoins are moving the most on which blockchains. Daily velocity (transfer volume / supply) varies wildly:
- USDC on Base: 14x/day median — the supply turns over 14 times daily. Velocity saw a massive surge in January 2026, where monthly transfer volume doubled vs the month prior, possibly as a consequence of a spike in dex and arbitrage activity.
- USDC also moves fast on Solana and Polygon, with values above 1.
- USDT on BNB: 1.4x/day
- USDT on Tron: 0.3x/day — steady and consistent, the payments rail
- USDT on Ethereum: 0.2x/day — $100B+ mostly sitting idle
Same token, different chains, completely different behavior. Tron holds 28% of supply but 7% of volume. Base holds 1.4% of supply but 57% of volume.
Beyond the dollar. Non-USD supply remains modest at roughly $1.2B (0.5% of total outstanding), yet 59 local-currency tokens are already live across six continents — nearly 30% of all active stablecoins. Issuers globally are moving quickly to tokenize domestic currencies, often targeting specific payment corridors, remittance flows, or onchain capital markets use cases.
That shift raises a more important question: what happens when stablecoins stop being primarily dollar-denominated liquidity instruments and start functioning as domestic settlement rails?
To explore that transition, Dune — in partnership with Visa — took a deeper look at local currency stablecoins, analyzing onchain behavior, holder distribution, transfer patterns, and chain specialization across regions. Using expanded data coverage and cross-chain analysis, we examined where these assets are scaling, who is using them, and how they differ from USD stablecoins in payments, FX, and treasury workflows.
Access the data behind the dashboards
Analyze where stablecoin balances sit and how transfers move across EVM, Solana, and TRON with raw foundation tables and premium enriched attribution datasets.
Explore the future of multi-currency payments
A comprehensive analysis of non-USD stablecoins across 30+ chains covering supply, activity, holder distribution, and regional adoption. Written in partnership with Visa. Sign up to get early access when it goes live.
Nothing in this newsletter constitutes financial advice.
Always do your own research.


