With the total supply of stablecoins surpassing $300 billion, they have become a core indicator of the crypto market and global finance. However, a single "market capitalization" figure cannot answer the questions most concerning to institutions, regulators, and the market: Who holds them? Is the capital concentrated? What is the velocity of liquidity? Is their true purpose trading, payments, or simply capital hoarding?
As the Meta project integrates stablecoin payments and payment companies and banks follow suit, data platform Dune has released a stablecoin report that provides a more comprehensive view closer to the "financial infrastructure perspective," covering supply, holder structure, on-chain activity, and fund flow velocity.
Market Structure: Giant monopolies persist, but challengers are emerging.
As of January 2026, the fully diluted supply of the top 15 stablecoins on EVM, Ecosystem Chain, Solana, and Tron reached $304 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%. However, market concentration remains extremely high, with USDT at $197 billion and USDC at $73 billion, together accounting for 89% of the market share.
From the perspective of the chain, it remains almost unchanged:
- Ethereum: 176 billion (approximately 58%)
- Tron: 84 billion (approximately 28%)
- Solana: 15 billion (approximately 5%)
- BNB Chain: 13 billion (approximately 4%)
However, 2025 is the "year of explosive growth for the second tier," with USDS increasing by 376% to 6.3 billion, PayPal PYUSD by 753%, and Ripple RLUSD surging by 1,803%. Meanwhile, USD1, issued by the Trump family's WLFI, grew from 0 to 5.1 billion, and USDG expanded 52 times. This means that while the market structure remains concentrated, the competitive landscape is rapidly thickening.
Who holds them? The exchanges are the real "largest users."
Dune is providing address-tag-level position analysis for the first time, and the results show:
- Centralized exchanges: $80 billion
- Whale address: 39 billion
- Revenue Strategy Agreement: 9.3 billion
- Issuer's inventory and casting addresses: 10.2 billion (annual increase of 4.6 times)
- Only 23% of the supply is located at unmarked addresses.
As of February 2026, a total of 172 million addresses held 15 mainstream stablecoins. Among them, there were approximately 136 million USDT holders, approximately 36 million USDC holders, and 4.7 million DAI holders. The distribution of these three mainstream stablecoins is relatively dispersed, with the top ten addresses holding only about 23-26%.
However, other stablecoins exhibit a high degree of concentration:
- USDS: Top 10 holders account for 90%
- USDF, USD0: Top ten holders account for 99%
- USD0's concentration index (HHI) is as high as 0.84.
This means the risk of decoupling is higher. Liquidity depth is limited, and "market capitalization" may only represent the holdings of a few institutions. For institutions, supply does not equal market depth.
Monthly transfer volume exceeds $10 trillion: Liquidity far exceeds scale
In January 2026, the on-chain transaction volume of stablecoins reached $10.3 trillion, more than doubling year-on-year. On-chain activity exhibits a different structure (the following are the public chain names and monthly transaction volumes):
- Base: 5.9 MB
- Ethereum: 2.4 trillion
- Tron: $682 billion
- Solana: 544 billion
It's worth noting that while the total stablecoin supply on Base is only 4.4 billion, it boasts the highest trading volume. USDC's trading volume is 8.3 trillion, nearly five times that of USDT. This indicates that USDC is used more frequently, while USDT is more geared towards fund storage and payment channels.
What exactly do stablecoins do? 90% of the traffic isn't actually payments.
After categorizing the transactions, Dune discovered that their primary use was:
Market infrastructure (largest)
- DEX liquidity provision and withdrawal: 5.9 trillion
- DEX trading volume: 376 billion
Leverage and Capital Efficiency
- Flash loan: 1.3 trillion
- Lending activities: 137 billion
Deposit and withdrawal channels
- CEX liquidity: 599 billion
- Cross-chain bridges: 28 billion
Issuer currency operations
Casting, destruction and adjustment: 106 billion (a five-fold increase annually)
As can be seen from the above, stablecoins are primarily used for market making and as collateral for liquidity. Genuine payment-related needs actually account for a limited proportion of the overall market.
Velocity of circulation reveals differences in roles: the same stablecoin, different worlds.
First, define velocity as: daily transaction volume ÷ supply.
It can be found that:
- USDC (Base): Turns over 14 times per day
- USDC (Ethereum): 0.9 times
- USDT (Tron): 0.3 times, stable for cross-border payments.
- USDT (Ethereum): Only 0.2 transactions, large amounts of funds are idle.
Yield-paying stablecoins are even lower:
- USDe: 0.09 times
- USDS: 0.5 times
The low speed is not a weakness, but rather indicates that funds are designed as a yield-harvesting tool. Furthermore, the same token can vary significantly across different chains; for example, PYUSD is four times faster on Solana than on Ethereum.
This article, titled "Stablecoin Market Cap Exceeds $300 Billion, What Else Do We Know?", originally appeared on ABMedia .
