Latest Stablecoin Report: Real Distribution and Flow Are Far More Important Than Supply

Author | @Dune

Compiled by | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Translator | Ding Dang (@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 cannot explain "who holds it," "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 stockpile, but the dynamic structure of how capital migrates, settles, leverages, and reprices on-chain.

This perspective is important because it may correct our intuitive judgments about the past year. The crypto market's downturn contrasts sharply with the strong performance of U.S. stocks. The panic amplified by whale sell-offs and price retracements easily leads to the impression that capital is fleeing the crypto world. However, the on-chain data presented in this article, along with signals from Circle's recent financial reports, suggest that funds may not have disappeared; they may have just temporarily withdrawn from high-volatility risk assets. At the very least, on-chain data proves they are entering incentive-driven activities rather than being used for trading demand.

Everyone cites that supply number. It appears in every report, every earnings call, every policy hearing. But beyond "circulating supply exceeding $300 billion," how much do we truly understand about stablecoins?

Who holds 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 on 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 Dune's newly released stablecoin dataset—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 49% year-over-year increase. Tether's USDT ($197 billion) and Circle's USDC ($73 billion) still dominate with an 89% market share.

In terms of 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 shown almost no significant change over the past year.

However, beneath the top two stablecoins, 2025 was a year of challenger rise. USDS (Sky/MakerDAO) grew 376% to $6.3 billion; PYUSD (PayPal) grew 753% to $2.8 billion; RLUSD (Ripple) surged from $58 million to $1.1 billion, a staggering 1803% increase; USDG expanded 52-fold; 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 with a 23% increase overall. Even so, the competitive layer beneath USDT and USDC has seen a significant increase in the number of rivals.

Who Holds 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 holds 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 remain, first and foremost, the infrastructure for exchange trading and settlement.

Whale wallets hold $39 billion; holdings in yield protocols nearly doubled to $9.3 billion, reflecting the growth of on-chain yield strategies; issuer addresses—including treasuries and mint/burn 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 remarkably 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.

In contrast, other stablecoins present a completely different picture. The top 10 wallets often control 60% to 99% of the supply. Take USDS as an example: despite its circulating supply reaching $6.9 billion, 90% of it is concentrated in 10 wallets (HHI 0.48). USDF is even more concentrated, with the top 10 addresses holding 99% of the supply (HHI 0.54). As for USD0, it almost reaches an extreme: similarly, 99% is concentrated in the top 10 wallets, but the HHI is as high as 0.84, meaning even within that top ten, the supply is predominantly dominated by one or two addresses.

This does not mean these stablecoins are inherently flawed—some projects launched recently, and some were 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-peg risk, liquidity depth, and whether the so-called "supply scale" represents genuine organic demand or merely reflects the allocation behavior of a few large holders. This type of analysis is only possible when you have balance data for every holder, not just aggregated supply derived from mint/burn events.

January 2026: Transfer Volume of $10.3 Trillion

In January 2026, the total stablecoin transfer volume 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 leads with $5.9 trillion, despite having only $4.4 billion in supply; Ethereum at $2.4 trillion; Tron at $682 billion; Solana at $544 billion; BNB Chain at $406 billion.

By token, USDC dominates 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 at $138 billion, USDS at $92 billion, USD1 at $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 like arbitrage, bots, and internal routing. We have not hardcoded judgments into the data but provide an objective lens, allowing users to choose their own filtering methods—whether to exclude bot transactions, identify organic usage, or define transaction activity metrics that better reflect reality.

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 on-chain triggers. This means we not only know "$10 trillion flowed," but also "why it flowed."

1. Market Infrastructure (DEX Trading & Liquidity)

• DEX Liquidity Supply & Withdrawal: $5.9 trillion—the largest use case, reflecting stablecoins' role as the base asset 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 Activity (Deposit, Lend, Repay, Withdraw): $137 billion—representing 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—showing stablecoins' function as a settlement channel 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 on-chain stack.

Velocity: Same Token, 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 with different characteristics.

USDC circulates fastest on L2s and Solana. On Base, USDC's average daily velocity reaches an astonishing 14x—a figure driven by high-frequency DeFi activity; on Solana and Polygon, it's around 1x; on Ethereum, it's 0.9x, meaning nearly the entire supply turns over almost daily.

USDT is fastest on BNB Chain and Tron. On BNB Chain, it reaches 1.4x, reflecting active trading; on Tron, it's 0.3x, with lower but exceptionally stable volume, consistent with its role as a primary channel for cross-border payments. On Ethereum, however, USDT is only 0.2x, with over $100 billion in 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 returns from Ethena's delta-neutral strategy; USDS is deposited into Sky's savings rate mechanism to earn protocol-subsidized yields. Consequently, 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 often more important than the token itself. Take PYUSD: its average daily velocity on Solana is 0.6x, four times its rate 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 given chain is active infrastructure or dormant capital.