Dune Stablecoin Research: Liquidity and Demand in a $300 Billion Market

Author: Dune

Compiled by: Ken, Chaincatcher

Everyone is citing supply data. It appears in every report, earnings call, and policy hearing. But aside from “circulating supply exceeding $300 billion,” how much do we really understand about stablecoins?

Who holds them? How concentrated is ownership? How fast do they transfer, and on which chains? What are their actual uses—DeFi liquidity, payments, or staking funds?

@Meta just announced plans to integrate third-party stablecoin payments across all its platforms; @Stablecoin received approval for a nationwide trust bank license from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). @Payoneer announced support for stablecoin payments for 2 million businesses. @Anchorage launched compliant stablecoin services for non-U.S. banks. Institutions and regulators are rushing in, and they need answers far beyond just supply data.

We used Dune’s newly released stablecoin dataset—developed in partnership with @SteakhouseFi—to answer some of these questions. Here’s what the data reveals.

Supply Landscape

Among the top 15 stablecoins on EVM, Solana, and Tron, as of January 2026, fully diluted supply reached $304 billion, up 49% year-over-year. @Tether’s USDT ($197 billion) and @Circle’s USDC ($73 billion) still dominate with 89% market share. By chain, @Ethereum hosts $176 billion (58%), Tron $84 billion (28%), @Solana $15 billion (5%), and @BNBCHAIN $13 billion (4%). Despite total supply nearly doubling, the distribution across these blockchains remained almost unchanged over the year.

But beneath the top two stablecoins, 2025 was a year of challengers. USDS (@SkyEcosystem/MakerDAO) grew 376% to $6.3 billion. PYUSD (@PayPal) surged 753% to $2.8 billion. RLUSD (@Ripple) jumped from $58 million to $1.1 billion, a 1,803% increase. USDG expanded 52-fold. USD1 skyrocketed from zero to $5.1 billion. Not all challengers followed the same path—USD0 declined 66%, while @ethena’s USDe, after nearly tripling in October, ended the year up 23%. Even so, the challenger camp under USDT and USDC has experienced decisive expansion.

Who Holds Them

Most stablecoin datasets can tell you total supply. Because our dataset tracks balances at the wallet level with address labels, we can tell you exactly who owns them.

On EVM and Solana, centralized exchanges (CEXs) are the largest known holders, with $80 billion—up from $58 billion a year earlier. Stablecoins remain primarily infrastructure for trading and settlement on exchanges. Whale wallets hold $39 billion. Yield protocol holdings nearly doubled to $9.3 billion, reflecting growth in on-chain yield strategies. Issuer addresses—treasuries and mint/burn contracts—shot up 4.6x from $2.2 billion to $10.2 billion, directly indicating how much new supply entered the market.

Regarding address label quality: only 23% of supply is held in fully unknown addresses. For on-chain data, this is a very high recognition rate, crucial for anyone trying to understand where stablecoin risk actually resides.

172 Million Holders, But Highly Concentrated

As of February 2026, 172 million unique addresses hold at least one of these 15 stablecoins. USDT accounts for 136 million addresses, USDC 36 million, DAI 4.7 million. These three stablecoins are truly widely distributed: the top 10 wallets hold only 23–26% of supply, with Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI)—a standard measure of concentration—below 0.03.

Other stablecoins tell a very different story. The top 10 wallets hold 60–99% of supply. Despite USDS’s $6.9 billion in circulation, 90% is concentrated in 10 wallets (HHI 0.48). The top 10 wallets for USDF hold 99% (HHI 0.54). USD0 is the most extreme: the top 10 wallets hold 99%, with an HHI of 0.84, indicating that even among the largest holders, the supply is nearly monopolized by one or two wallets.

This doesn’t necessarily mean these stablecoins are problematic—some are new, others are intentionally concentrated by institutions. But it does mean that interpreting their supply data requires a very different approach than with USDT or USDC. Concentration impacts de-pegging risk, liquidity depth, and whether “supply” reflects natural demand or the behavior of a few large players. Only when you have detailed data on each holder’s balance—not just total supply from mint/burn events—can you perform this level of analysis.

$10.3 Trillion Transferred in January

On EVM, Solana, and @trondao, stablecoin transfer volume hit $10.3 trillion in January 2026—more than double January 2025. The breakdown per chain is astonishing and starkly different from supply figures: Base leads with $5.9 trillion in transfers, despite only $44 million in supply. Ethereum accounts for $2.4 trillion. Tron $682 billion. Solana $544 billion. BNB Chain $406 billion.

By token, USDC dominates with $8.3 trillion in transfers—almost five times USDT’s $1.7 trillion—despite its supply being 2.7 times smaller than USDT. USDC’s transfer velocity and frequency are higher than USDT’s. DAI’s transfers total $138 billion, USDS $92 billion, USD1 $43 billion.

Importantly, this data is deliberately neutral. It does not filter transfers based on assumptions about “real” economic activity. Total transfer volume may include funds related to arbitrage, bots, internal routing, or automation. The dataset aims to present an objective view of on-chain activity, giving users the flexibility to apply their own filters—whether to exclude bot-driven volume, isolate organic activity, or define a custom transfer metric.

What Are Stablecoins Really Used For?

This is where the dataset’s granularity shines. Transfers are no longer just “volume”—they are categorized into different on-chain activities. There’s a big difference between “$10 trillion transferred” and “understanding why it was transferred.”

January Breakdown:

1. Market Infrastructure (DEX trading and liquidity)

• Providing DEX liquidity and extracting from pools: $5.9 trillion. The largest single use case, reflecting stablecoins’ role as on-chain market-making assets.
• DEX swaps: $376 billion. Direct trading activity across AMMs.

Together, these highlight stablecoins’ primary role as trading collateral and liquidity infrastructure. Interestingly, most volume is driven by incentivized activities (like liquidity mining and active capital optimization), not pure trading demand.

2. Leverage and Capital Efficiency (lending + flash loans)

• Flash loans (borrowing and repayment): $1.3 trillion. Automated arbitrage and liquidation cycles.
• Lending activities—providing, borrowing, repaying, withdrawing: $137 billion. Reflecting short-term capital efficiency and structured credit on-chain.

3. Access Channels (CEX and cross-chain bridges)

• CEX flows—deposits ($224 billion), withdrawals ($224 billion), internal transfers ($151 billion): total $599 billion.
• Cross-chain bridge deposits and withdrawals: $28 billion. These flows show stablecoins acting as channels for settlement between centralized exchanges and across chains.

4. Issuer Operations (monetary management)

• Issuer activities—minting ($28 billion), burning ($20 billion), re-pegging ($23 billion), and other issuer actions: $106 billion. Nearly five times the $42 billion recorded a year earlier.

5. Yield Protocols

• Yield protocol activity: $2.7 billion. A smaller but structurally significant segment, closely tied to structured strategies and on-chain asset management.

Overall, 90% of transfer volume flows through identified activity categories, providing a granular view of stablecoin movement across each layer of the on-chain tech stack.

Transfer Velocity: Same Token, Different Worlds

Daily transfer velocity (volume divided by supply) may be the most underutilized metric in stablecoin analysis. It indicates how actively a stablecoin is used as a medium of exchange relative to just being held.

Among the tokens analyzed, USDC and USDT stand out again, though their patterns differ.

USDC’s velocity is fastest on Layer 2 networks and Solana. On Base, its median daily turnover reaches 14x—an astonishing figure driven by high-frequency DeFi activity. On Solana and Polygon, daily velocity hovers around 1x. Even on Ethereum, USDC’s velocity is about 0.9x, meaning nearly all supply is circulating daily.

USDT’s velocity is highest on BNB and Tron. On BNB Chain, USDT’s daily turnover is 1.4x, reflecting active trading. On Tron, it’s lower at 0.3x but remarkably stable day-to-day, consistent with its role as a dominant cross-border payment channel. On Ethereum, USDT’s velocity is only 0.2x, with over $100 billion largely idle.

USDe and USDS have slower velocities, as designed. USDe on Ethereum has a daily velocity of just 0.09x, USDS about 0.5x. Both are yield-bearing stablecoins: USDe is often staked as sUSDe to earn Ethena’s delta-neutral fee strategies, while USDS is deposited into Sky Savings Rate for protocol yields. Much of their supply remains in savings contracts, Aave, or structured yield loops. Here, low velocity isn’t a flaw—it’s a feature: these assets are engineered to accumulate yield, not to circulate.

The underlying blockchain matters more than the token itself. PYUSD on Solana has a daily velocity of 0.6x—more than four times faster than on Ethereum (0.1x). The same token, vastly different usage patterns depending on the ecosystem.

Supply and transfer volume tell only part of the story. Velocity links them—one metric capturing whether a stablecoin on a particular chain is functioning as active infrastructure or just idle funds.

Beyond the US Dollar

This analysis focuses mainly on 15 USD stablecoins, but the full dataset covers over 200 stablecoins representing more than 20 fiat currencies: 17 euro tokens ($990 million), 1.41 million Brazilian real tokens, 13 million Japanese yen tokens, and tokens pegged to NGN (Nigerian Naira), KES (Kenyan Shilling), ZAR (South African Rand), TRY (Turkish Lira), IDR (Indonesian Rupiah), SGD (Singapore Dollar), and others.

Non-USD stablecoins total only $120 million in supply currently, but 59 tokens are live across six continents—nearly 30% of all tokens in our dataset. Infrastructure for local fiat-backed stablecoins is building on-chain, and data tracking them is ready.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

All the insights here are derived from just a few queries on a single dataset. We examined only 15 stablecoins and a handful of core metrics, but the full dataset covers nearly 200 stablecoins across more than 30 blockchains.

What makes this dataset unique isn’t just its breadth—it’s its classification layer. Every transfer is mapped to its on-chain trigger and categorized into one of nine activity types using a deterministic priority framework. Each balance is segmented by holder type, and a standardized classification system is applied across all chains. This transforms noisy blockchain logs into structured, comparable data—revealing mechanisms, capital flows between venues, concentration risks, and participation patterns.

This granularity enables us to answer questions we haven’t yet asked: Which wallets started accumulating a new stablecoin before it hit exchanges? How does concentration shift in the days before de-pegging? What are cross-chain bridge flows for euro-pegged stablecoins? How do mint/burn patterns relate to market pressures? And many more.

This is the kind of dataset designed to support institutional analysis, research reports, risk modeling, compliance workflows, and executive dashboards. The depth is here. Start exploring.