The total supply of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, becoming a key indicator in the crypto market and global finance. However, a single “market cap” figure cannot answer the most important questions for institutions, regulators, and markets: Who holds these assets? Is the capital concentrated? How fast is it moving? Are they primarily used for trading, payments, or capital parking?
As Meta plans to integrate stablecoin payments and payment companies and banks are entering the space, data platform Dune has released a stablecoin report that provides a comprehensive view closer to “financial infrastructure perspective,” covering supply, holder structure, on-chain activity, and capital flow velocity.
Market Structure: Dominance of Giants Continues, Challengers Emerging
By January 2026, the fully diluted supply of the top 15 stablecoins on EVM, ecosystem chains, Solana, and Tron reaches $304 billion, a 49% increase year-over-year. However, market concentration remains high, with USDT at $197 billion and USDC at $73 billion, together accounting for 89% of the market share.
From a chain perspective, the distribution remains almost unchanged:
Ethereum: $176 billion (~58%)
Tron: $84 billion (~28%)
Solana: $15 billion (~5%)
BNB Chain: $13 billion (~4%)
But 2025 is expected to be the “second wave of explosive growth,” with USDS increasing by 376% to $6.3 billion, PayPal PYUSD soaring by 753%, Ripple RLUSD skyrocketing by 1,803%. Additionally, the USD issued by the Trump family’s WLFI grew from zero to $5.1 billion, and USDG expanded 52-fold. This indicates that while the market remains concentrated, the competition layer is rapidly thickening.
Who Holds These? Exchanges Are the Real “Largest Users”
Dune has for the first time provided address label-level holdings analysis, revealing:
Centralized exchanges: $80 billion
Whale addresses: $39 billion
Yield strategy protocols: $9.3 billion
Issuers’ reserves and minting addresses: $10.2 billion (up 4.6 times annually)
Only 23% of the supply is held in unlabelled addresses.
As of February 2026, there are 172 million addresses holding the 15 mainstream stablecoins. Among them, USDT holders number about 136 million, USDC about 36 million, and DAI about 4.7 million. These three major stablecoins are relatively dispersed, with the top ten addresses holding only about 23–26%.
However, other stablecoins show high concentration:
USDS: top ten hold 90%
USDF, USD0: top ten hold 99%
USD0’s concentration index (HHI) reaches 0.84
This suggests higher disconnection risk. Liquidity depth is limited, and “market cap” may only represent a small number of institutional holdings. For institutions, supply does not equate to market depth.
Monthly transfer volume exceeds $10 trillion: liquidity far exceeds scale
In January 2026, on-chain stablecoin transfers reached $10.3 trillion, more than doubling year-over-year. On-chain activity shows a different structure (below are public chain names and monthly transaction volumes):
Base: $5.9 trillion
Ethereum: $2.4 trillion
Tron: $682 billion
Solana: $544 billion
Notably, the stablecoin supply on Base is only $4.4 billion but it ranks first in trading volume. USDC’s trading volume is $8.3 trillion, nearly five times that of USDT. This indicates USDC is used at high frequency, while USDT is more for storage and payment channels.
What Are Stablecoins Really Doing? 90% of Traffic Is Not Payments
Dune’s classification of transactions shows that the main use cases are:
Market infrastructure (largest)
DEX liquidity provision and withdrawal: $5.9 trillion
DEX trading: $376 billion
Leverage and capital efficiency
Flash loans: $1.3 trillion
Lending activities: $137 billion
Deposit and withdrawal channels
CEX liquidity: $599 billion
Cross-chain bridges: $28 billion
Issuer token operations
Minting, burning, and adjustments: $106 billion (up 5 times annually)
From this, it’s clear that stablecoins are mainly used for market making and liquidity collateral. Actual payment needs account for a relatively small portion of the overall activity.
Velocity Reveals Role Differences: Same Stablecoin, Different Worlds
Velocity is defined as daily transaction volume divided by supply.
Findings include:
USDC (Base): 14 turns per day
USDC (Ethereum): 0.9 turns
USDT (Tron): 0.3 turns, mainly used for cross-border payments
USDT (Ethereum): only 0.2 turns, with large amounts of idle funds
Yield-oriented stablecoins are even lower:
USDe: 0.09 turns
USDS: 0.5 turns
Low velocity is not a weakness but indicates that funds are designed as yield parking tools. Additionally, the same token can have vastly different velocities across chains; for example, PYUSD on Solana has four times the velocity of on Ethereum.
This article: The market cap of stablecoins has exceeded $300 billion. What else do we know? Originally published on Chain News ABMedia.
