Stablecoin Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis, Digital Finance & Fintech | Last updated: September 2, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Two issuers hold 84.65% of a $303.82 billion market. Two blockchains carry 82.77% of the supply those issuers have deployed. Axis Intelligence Research measured the stablecoin sector’s structural concentration at 4,249 index points on September 2, 2026 — 1.70 times the level at which US antitrust authorities classify a market as highly concentrated.
Quick Answer
Global stablecoin supply stood at $303.82 billion on September 2, 2026, and Axis Intelligence Research traced 99.87% of it to just 28 issuers. Tether’s USDT accounts for 60.34% of the market and Circle’s USDC for 24.31%. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the sector’s Stablecoin Structural Concentration Index (SSCI) reads 4,249 at issuer level and 3,535 at settlement-layer level — both far above the 2,500-point threshold that defines a highly concentrated market. The sector has grown 12.53% since the Bank for International Settlements measured it at $270 billion in December 2025.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the stablecoin market’s issuer-level SSCI reading is 4,249 index points as of September 2, 2026 — 1.70 times the 2,500-point threshold at which the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission classify a market as highly concentrated. No other systemically relevant segment of dollar money markets operates at this level of issuer concentration.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that Ethereum and Tron together carry 82.77% of all USDT and USDC in circulation — $212.88 billion of a $257.19 billion settlement base spread across 136 distinct blockchains. The remaining 134 chains share 17.23% between them, and 118 of them hold under $100 million each.
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates Circle’s Issuer Loss-Absorption Ratio (ILAR) at 4.81% against Tether’s 2.24% as of June 30, 2026 — meaning Circle carries 2.15 times more shareholder equity per dollar of stablecoin liability than Tether carries in attested excess reserves. Tether’s buffer fell 50.07% in a single quarter, from $8.23 billion to $4.11 billion, while its token liabilities barely moved.
- Axis Intelligence Research measures the yield-on-float spread between the two dominant issuers at 24.25 basis points. Circle earned an annualised 3.49% on average USDC circulation in Q2 2026; Tether’s net operating profit annualises to 3.25% of USDT issued. In a business where the product is a non-interest-bearing liability, that spread is the entire economics.
- Stablecoin issuers bought nearly $35 billion of US Treasury bills during 2025 — equivalent to 12.96% of the sector’s own December 2025 asset base, per Bank for International Settlements research. A $3.5 billion inflow measurably compresses three-month bill yields, by 0.71 basis points on impact and roughly 5 basis points at the 13-day trough.
How Big Is the Stablecoin Market in 2026?
The honest answer starts with a caveat about the question. There is no regulator-published stablecoin supply figure. Every number in circulation traces back to on-chain token accounting, and different trackers include different assets — tokenised money market funds, yield-bearing instruments, and crypto-collateralised synthetics all get counted or excluded depending on whose definition you use.
Axis Intelligence Research uses $303.82 billion as the canonical September 2, 2026 total, and verified it rather than accepting it. We pulled the full DeFiLlama stablecoins registry that day and summed circulating supply issuer by issuer. Twenty-eight issuers above $250 million account for 99.87% of the total; the residual is a long tail of sub-$250 million tokens, none of which changes any conclusion on this page.
That reconciliation matters more than it looks. It means the stablecoin market is not a diffuse ecosystem of hundreds of issuers. It is 28 balance sheets, and really it is two.
Stablecoin Supply by Issuer, September 2, 2026
| Issuer / token | Circulating supply | Market share | Peg mechanism | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tether (USDT) | $183.33B | 60.34% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Circle (USDC) | $73.85B | 24.31% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Sky Dollar (USDS) | $6.63B | 2.18% | Crypto-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Dai (DAI) | $4.78B | 1.57% | Crypto-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Ethena (USDe) | $4.24B | 1.40% | Crypto-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| World Liberty Financial (USD1) | $4.21B | 1.39% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Global Dollar (USDG) | $3.16B | 1.04% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| PayPal USD (PYUSD) | $2.76B | 0.91% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| BlackRock (BUIDL) | $2.75B | 0.91% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Circle (USYC) | $2.70B | 0.89% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Ripple (RLUSD) | $2.39B | 0.79% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
| Ondo (USDY) | $2.18B | 0.72% | Fiat-backed | DeFiLlama registry |
Source: DeFiLlama Stablecoins API, peggedAssets registry, retrieved September 2, 2026. Shares calculated by Axis Intelligence Research against the $303.818 billion dashboard aggregate. Full 28-issuer table in the dataset.
Concentration ratios tell the story faster than the table does. The top two issuers hold 84.65% of supply. The top five hold 89.80%. The top ten hold 94.93%. Everything from position eleven downward is competing for roughly one dollar in twenty.
Sarah Davis writes: Look at what sits in positions eight through twelve — PayPal, BlackRock, Ripple, Ondo. These are not crypto-native startups. They are firms with distribution most issuers would trade their float for, and they are collectively holding about 3.3% of the market. That gap between brand strength and token share is the most underrated fact in this dataset. Distribution does not automatically convert into circulation, because circulation follows liquidity, and liquidity has already pooled somewhere else. A treasurer picks the token their counterparties can accept at par on a Sunday afternoon, not the one with the best-known logo.
The Axis Stablecoin Structural Concentration Index (SSCI)
Concentration is the sector’s defining structural fact, and nobody publishes a standing measurement of it. So we built one.
SSCI — the Stablecoin Structural Concentration Index — applies the Herfindahl-Hirschman method to stablecoin supply across two independent dimensions, and publishes both readings side by side rather than blending them into a single opaque score.
Formula
SSCI-Issuer = Σ (sᵢ)², where sᵢ is issuer i‘s percentage share of total stablecoin supply.
SSCI-Settlement = Σ (cⱼ)², where cⱼ is blockchain j‘s percentage share of the combined USDT + USDC settlement base.
Both readings run on a 0–10,000 scale. The US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines treat a market above 2,500 as highly concentrated; the same threshold is used here so the reading is interpretable against a published external benchmark rather than against itself.
Readings, September 2, 2026
| SSCI dimension | Reading | Multiple of the 2,500 threshold | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issuer concentration | 4,249 | 1.70× | 28 issuers, $303.818B denominator |
| Settlement-layer concentration | 3,535 | 1.41× | 136 chains, $257.188B USDT+USDC base |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research calculation on the DeFiLlama peggedAssets registry retrieved September 2, 2026. Arithmetic verified in floating-point and exact rational form; both methods return 4,249.00 and 3,534.91 respectively.
Inputs and weights
Every input is a sourced supply figure from the registry snapshot; no component is weighted, estimated, or adjusted. Issuers below $250 million are excluded from the issuer reading, which biases the result downward — each excluded token contributes less than 0.01 index points, so 4,249 is a floor, not a midpoint. The settlement reading covers USDT and USDC only, which together represent 84.65% of supply; smaller issuers are more chain-concentrated, not less, so this reading is also conservative.
Both readings are reproducible. Pull the same endpoint, square the shares, sum them. That is the whole method, and it is stated here precisely so that a journalist, a regulator, or a competing analyst can check it.
These are the baseline readings. The SSCI will be re-measured quarterly, and future readings will be dated snapshots rather than revisions of this one.
Which Blockchains Actually Carry Stablecoin Supply?
The token you hold and the rail it settles on are separate risks, and the second one gets far less attention.
Axis Intelligence Research reconstructed the chain-level distribution of every USDT and USDC token from the registry’s per-chain circulating fields. The two issuers’ chain totals sum exactly to their reported aggregate supply — $183.33 billion and $73.85 billion respectively — which is a hard validation that the underlying data is internally consistent.
USDT + USDC Supply by Blockchain, September 2, 2026
| Blockchain | Combined USDT + USDC | Share of settlement base | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | $121.11B | 47.09% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Tron | $91.77B | 35.68% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| BNB Smart Chain | $10.76B | 4.18% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Solana | $9.64B | 3.75% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Hyperliquid L1 | $6.76B | 2.63% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Base | $4.21B | 1.64% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Arbitrum | $3.04B | 1.18% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Polygon | $2.57B | 1.00% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Aptos | $1.04B | 0.40% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Avalanche | $0.75B | 0.29% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Plasma | $0.62B | 0.24% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| TON | $0.61B | 0.24% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
| Other 124 chains | $4.91B | 1.91% | Axis calculation on DeFiLlama registry |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, summing per-chain circulating supply for USDT and USDC in the DeFiLlama peggedAssets registry, retrieved September 2, 2026. Settlement base: $257.188 billion across 136 chains.
The split between the top two is more interesting than the total. Ethereum’s $121.11 billion is dominated by USDC — $47.42 billion of USDC against $73.69 billion of USDT — while Tron’s $91.77 billion is USDT almost to the last dollar, with under $28 million of USDC present. These are not two versions of the same market. Ethereum is where institutional and DeFi collateral sits. Tron is where dollar access happens in economies whose residents cannot easily open a dollar account.
Hyperliquid L1 is the outlier worth naming. It holds $6.65 billion of USDC — more than Base, Arbitrum and Polygon combined — because perpetual futures margin has to sit somewhere, and it has quietly become the fourth-largest USDC venue on any chain.
Who Issues Stablecoins, and How Do They Make Money?
A stablecoin issuer runs the simplest business model in finance: take deposits, pay nothing on them, invest in short-dated government paper, keep the carry. The float is the company. Everything else is distribution cost.
That makes the yield on float the only issuer metric that really matters, and the two dominant issuers disclose enough for a direct comparison.
Issuer Economics, Q2 2026
| Metric | Tether (USDT) | Circle (USDC) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tokens outstanding, period end | $184.6B | $73.3B | Issuer disclosure |
| Quarterly income on reserves | $1.50B net operating profit | $668M reserve income | Issuer disclosure |
| Annualised yield on float (Axis) | 3.2503% | 3.4928% | Axis calculation |
| Disclosed reserve return rate | Not disclosed | 3.5% | Circle Q2 2026 release |
| Onchain transaction volume | Not disclosed | $14.8T (+151% YoY) | Circle Q2 2026 release |
| Loss-absorption ratio, ILAR (Axis) | 2.2380% | 4.8130% | Axis calculation |
| Independent assurance | KPMG audit, FY2025, unqualified | SEC-reporting, quarterly filings | Issuer disclosure |
Sources: Tether Q2 2026 attestation announcement, July 31, 2026; Circle Internet Group Q2 2026 results, filed with the SEC August 5, 2026. Axis calculations detailed in Methodology.
The 24.25 basis point spread in Tether’s favour is not a spread in Tether’s favour. It runs the other way: Circle earns more per dollar of float. Circle’s disclosed reserve return rate of 3.5% cross-checks against our independent calculation of 3.4928% from reserve income and average circulation, which is exactly the kind of agreement you want between a company’s stated metric and an outsider’s reconstruction of it.
Tether’s 3.2503% is lower because its reserve is not purely bills. It holds gold — more than 146 tonnes after adding 14 during the quarter — plus bitcoin and secured loans. Net operating profit deliberately excludes mark-to-market swings on those positions, so 3.25% measures the recurring carry, not the total change in what the reserve is worth.
The Issuer Loss-Absorption Ratio (ILAR)
ILAR = equity or attested excess reserves ÷ stablecoin liabilities outstanding, × 100.
This is the cushion that absorbs a valuation shock before the peg itself is tested, expressed per dollar of token outstanding. For Tether we use attested excess reserves over tokens issued: $4,109,529,196 ÷ $183,622,105,630 = 2.2380%. For Circle we use total stockholders’ equity over deposits from stablecoin holders: $3,509,975 thousand ÷ $72,927,544 thousand = 4.8130%. Circle’s cushion is 2.15 times thicker.
The trajectory matters as much as the level. Tether’s buffer stood at $8.23 billion on March 31, 2026 and $4.11 billion on June 30 — a 50.07% contraction in one quarter, driven entirely by the asset side while token liabilities moved less than half a billion dollars. Tether earned $1.50 billion during that same quarter, which means the underlying asset writedown was larger than the headline decline suggests.
Sarah Davis writes: Every no-fee product has a fee somewhere, and in stablecoins the fee is the interest you don’t receive. Hold $10,000 of USDT for a year and Tether books roughly $325 of carry on it. Hold $10,000 of USDC and Circle books roughly $349, most of which it hands to Coinbase and other distribution partners — Circle paid out $412 million in distribution and transaction costs in Q2 against $701 million of revenue. That’s a 59% take for the shelf space. The economics of this industry are not the economics of a payment network. They are the economics of a money market fund that pays its shareholders nothing and its shelf space everything.
Circle’s own activity data shows the float is anything but passive: $83 billion of USDC minted and $87 billion redeemed in a single quarter, against $73.3 billion outstanding. The stock turns over more than once a quarter.
How Much of the US Treasury Bill Market Do Stablecoins Now Own?
This is where stablecoin statistics stop being a crypto story.
The Bank for International Settlements measured the sector’s combined assets under management at over $270 billion in December 2025 and found that issuers purchased nearly $35 billion of US Treasury bills during 2025 — comparable to the largest US government money market funds and larger than most foreign sovereign purchases. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that those purchases equalled 12.96% of the sector’s own asset base for the year.
The price effect is measurable and tightly bounded to the front end.
Estimated Treasury Bill Yield Response to Stablecoin Flows
| Horizon | Effect on 3-month bill yield | Shock size | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| On impact | −0.71 basis points | $3.5B inflow | BIS Working Paper 1270 |
| Within 10 days | ≈ −4 basis points | $3.5B inflow | BIS Working Paper 1270 |
| Trough (13 days) | ≈ −5 basis points | $3.5B inflow | BIS Working Paper 1270 |
| Longer tenors | No spillover found | $3.5B inflow | BIS Working Paper 1270 |
Source: Bank for International Settlements, Working Paper 1270, Ahmed and Aldasoro. Daily data January 2021 to March 2026, local projections with a granular instrumental variable. Effects are state-dependent and strengthen under Treasury market stress.
Read that table with the concentration finding beside it. The BIS effect is real but the transmission channel is narrow — it runs through two redemption desks. When 84.65% of stablecoin supply sits with two issuers, a bid for Treasury bills that the Treasury market now visibly prices is, operationally, two firms’ reserve management policies.
The reserve rules make the maturity confinement explicit. The FDIC’s proposed GENIUS Act rule deems repurchase agreements approved where the underlying Treasury bills carry 93 days or less of remaining maturity, per the Federal Register notice published April 10, 2026. Stablecoin reserve demand is structurally a bill bid. It cannot migrate up the curve even if issuers wanted it to.
What Does the GENIUS Act Actually Require, and When?
The regulatory picture in September 2026 is a framework enacted but not yet operative, with three federal rulemakings running in parallel against a hard statutory deadline.
GENIUS Act Implementation Timeline
| Date | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| July 18, 2025 | GENIUS Act enacted | US Treasury |
| March 2, 2026 | OCC proposed rule published in the Federal Register (376 pages) | Federal Register / OCC |
| May 1, 2026 | OCC comment period closes | Federal Register |
| April 10, 2026 | FDIC proposed rule published in the Federal Register | Federal Register |
| June 9, 2026 | FDIC comment period closes | Federal Register |
| August 17, 2026 | Treasury issues section 3 proposed rule | US Treasury |
| January 18, 2027 | Expected effective date; licence required to issue in the US | US Treasury |
| July 18, 2028 | Service providers may offer only licensed issuers’ stablecoins | US Treasury |
Sources: OCC Bulletin 2026-3; Federal Register 2026-04089; US Treasury, August 17, 2026.
The Act takes effect on the earlier of eighteen months after enactment or 120 days after final rules — which, with no final rules yet issued, resolves to January 18, 2027. From that date a person generally may not issue a payment stablecoin in the United States without a federal or state licence. Treasury’s proposed rule defines what “issue in the United States” and “offer or sell to a person in the United States” actually mean, and its comment window was still open as of publication.
The second date is the one the market has not priced. From July 18, 2028, digital asset service providers generally may not offer or sell any payment stablecoin to persons in the United States unless it was issued by a licensed issuer. That is a distribution cutoff, not an issuance rule, and it applies to exchanges and wallets rather than to issuers.
Sarah Davis writes: Two issuers have taken visibly different routes to the same deadline. Circle went through the front door — it received final OCC approval for a national trust bank and a New York limited-purpose trust charter, and it files quarterly with the SEC. Tether went the other way and bought credibility with an audit, completing an inaugural KPMG examination of its 2025 financial statements with an unqualified opinion in August 2026, after more than a decade of attestation-only reporting. Both are answers to the same question a US institutional allocator has been asking since 2021: who signs off on the reserve? For the first time, both have an answer.
Where the Non-Dollar Segment Stands
Effectively nowhere, and that is itself the finding. Of the 28 issuers above $250 million in the September 2 registry, every one is dollar-pegged. The euro, sterling, yen and Singapore dollar segments combined do not produce a single token at that threshold.
That is not a data gap. It is the structure of the market. Stablecoin demand is dollar demand, and the tokens are a distribution technology for it. A euro stablecoin competes against a euro bank account that already works; a dollar stablecoin in São Paulo, Lagos or Istanbul competes against a dollar account the holder cannot open. Regulatory clarity in Europe changes who may issue, not why anyone would hold.
Methodology
Data collection
Axis Intelligence Research assembled this dataset by direct retrieval of primary and issuer-published documents during a production session on September 2, 2026. Every figure in the prose above corresponds to a row in the accompanying CSV, with source organisation, document, URL and retrieval date.
- DeFiLlama Stablecoins API (
stablecoins.llama.fi/stablecoins) — fullpeggedAssetsregistry including per-issuer and per-chain circulating supply, retrieved September 2, 2026. Source for all supply, share, and chain-distribution figures. - Bank for International Settlements, Working Paper 1270, Ahmed and Aldasoro, Stablecoins and safe asset prices — sector AUM, 2025 Treasury bill purchases, and yield-response estimates.
- Tether International S.A. de C.V., Q2 2026 attestation announcement (BDO), July 31, 2026, and the inaugural KPMG audit announcement, August 13, 2026.
- Circle Internet Group, Inc., Q2 2026 results press release furnished to the SEC on August 5, 2026, including the condensed consolidated balance sheet and statements of operations; Q1 2026 results press release for prior-quarter comparatives.
- OCC Bulletin 2026-3, Federal Register notices 2026-04089 and 2026-06974, and the US Treasury section 3 rulemaking announcement of August 17, 2026 — regulatory dates and reserve-eligibility rules.
Formulas
SSCI-Issuer = Σ(sᵢ)² where sᵢ is each issuer’s percentage share of the $303.818 billion aggregate. Reading: 4,249.00.
SSCI-Settlement = Σ(cⱼ)² where cⱼ is each blockchain’s percentage share of the $257.188 billion combined USDT + USDC base across 136 chains. Reading: 3,534.91.
ILAR = loss-absorbing capital ÷ stablecoin liabilities × 100. Tether: 4,109,529,196 ÷ 183,622,105,630 = 2.2380%. Circle: 3,509,975 ÷ 72,927,544 (thousands) = 4.8130%.
Annualised yield on float = quarterly reserve income × 4 ÷ float × 100. Tether: 1.50 × 4 ÷ 184.6 = 3.2503%. Circle: 0.668 × 4 ÷ 76.5 = 3.4928%.
Every calculation above was executed twice — once in floating-point and once in exact rational arithmetic using Python’s fractions.Fraction — and both passes agree to the digits published.
Scope
The SSCI issuer reading excludes tokens below $250 million in circulating supply; each such token contributes under 0.01 index points, so the published reading is a conservative floor. The settlement reading covers USDT and USDC only. Supply figures are on-chain token accounting, which measures issued tokens rather than economically active balances. The ILAR comparison places Tether’s attested excess reserves alongside Circle’s audited stockholders’ equity; these are related but not identical accounting concepts, and both are disclosed here so readers can weight them accordingly. Treasury yield estimates are econometric findings from a single working paper and carry that paper’s identification assumptions.
About This Dataset
Contents: 142 rows covering stablecoin supply by issuer and by blockchain, issuer financial disclosures, reserve composition, Treasury market linkages, SSCI and ILAR readings, and US regulatory implementation dates. Point-in-time coverage September 2, 2026, with issuer financials as of June 30, 2026 and comparatives back to June 30, 2025.
Creator and publisher: Axis Intelligence Research
Spatial coverage: Global, with United States regulatory and Treasury market rows
License: CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse with attribution to Axis Intelligence Research
Citation
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Stablecoin statistics 2026: Supply, issuers, reserves and market concentration. https://axis-intelligence.com/stablecoin-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Stablecoin Statistics 2026: Supply, Issuers, Reserves and Market Concentration.” Axis Intelligence Research, 2 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/stablecoin-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Stablecoin Statistics 2026: Supply, Issuers, Reserves and Market Concentration.” Axis Intelligence Research. September 2, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/stablecoin-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do stablecoin supply figures differ between trackers?
Because there is no regulatory definition of what counts. Tokenised money market funds like BlackRock’s BUIDL and yield-bearing instruments like Ondo’s USDY appear in some registries and not others, and crypto-collateralised synthetics such as USDe are classified differently again. Axis Intelligence Research uses the DeFiLlama peggedAssets registry and publishes the issuer-level breakdown so readers can subtract any category they consider out of scope.
What is the SSCI, and what would a lower reading actually look like?
The Stablecoin Structural Concentration Index applies the Herfindahl-Hirschman method to stablecoin supply shares. At 4,249 index points, the issuer market sits 1.70 times above the 2,500 threshold that US antitrust authorities treat as highly concentrated. Getting below 2,500 would require the largest issuer’s share to fall to roughly 40% with the remainder genuinely dispersed — a structural change, not a market-share drift.
Why does Tron hold $91.77 billion of USDT but almost no USDC?
Because the two tokens serve different demand. Tron’s low, predictable transfer cost made it the default rail for retail dollar transfers in economies with restricted access to dollar banking, and USDT got there first with the liquidity depth those corridors need. USDC’s distribution has been built through regulated exchanges, institutional custodians and DeFi venues, which cluster on Ethereum and its Layer 2s. Under $28 million of USDC circulates on Tron against $91.74 billion of USDT.
Does the size of a stablecoin’s reserve buffer tell you whether the peg is safe?
Not on its own, but the direction of travel is informative. Tether’s attested excess reserves fell 50.07% between March 31 and June 30, 2026 while token liabilities barely moved, which means the asset side took the loss. A buffer at 2.24% of tokens issued absorbs a 2.24% valuation shock across the reserve before par redemption is arithmetically stressed. Composition matters as much as size: a buffer backed by bills behaves differently from one backed by gold and bitcoin.
How do stablecoin issuers earn money if holders receive no yield?
They invest the reserve and keep the carry. Circle earned $668 million of reserve income in Q2 2026 on average circulation of $76.5 billion, a 3.5% reserve return rate, and paid $412 million of that quarter’s $701 million total revenue out in distribution and transaction costs. The float is the product. Holders supply interest-free funding and receive dollar-denominated liquidity in return.
What happens to stablecoins that are not GENIUS-licensed after 2028?
From July 18, 2028, digital asset service providers in the United States generally may not offer or sell payment stablecoins to US persons unless the issuer is licensed, per Treasury’s August 2026 rulemaking. That is a distribution restriction placed on exchanges, brokers and wallet providers rather than a ban on the token itself. The commercial effect is that unlicensed tokens lose their US on-ramp and off-ramp.
Do stablecoin flows really move US Treasury yields?
At the front of the curve, yes, and the effect is quantified. BIS Working Paper 1270 finds a $3.5 billion inflow lowers three-month bill yields by 0.71 basis points on impact, around 4 basis points within ten days, and roughly 5 basis points at the 13-day trough, with no measurable spillover to longer tenors. The effect strengthens during Treasury market stress and as the sector grows.
Why are stablecoin reserves confined to short-dated bills?
Because the GENIUS Act reserve rules require it. The FDIC’s proposed rule treats Treasury bills with 93 days or less of remaining maturity as eligible reserve collateral. Redemption at par on demand and duration risk are incompatible, so the statute removes the choice. It also means stablecoin growth generates bill demand specifically, not general Treasury demand.
Which blockchain should a treasurer choose to hold stablecoins on?
That is a liquidity question, not a technology question. Ethereum carries $121.11 billion of USDT and USDC combined and Tron $91.77 billion; together they hold 82.77% of the settlement base. Anything outside the top eight chains carries under 1% of supply, which shows up as wider spreads and thinner redemption depth when size needs to move. Axis Intelligence Research publishes the full 136-chain distribution in the dataset so the tradeoff can be priced rather than assumed.
How does USDC’s on-chain volume reach $14.8 trillion on $73.3 billion of supply?
Because the same tokens are reused continuously. Circle reported $14.8 trillion of on-chain USDC volume in Q2 2026 against $73.3 billion outstanding, alongside $83 billion minted and $87 billion redeemed in the quarter. Raw on-chain volume counts every transfer including exchange internal movement, arbitrage and automated contract mechanics, so it is a measure of velocity rather than of payments. For the payment-specific breakdown, see our analysis of stablecoin payment statistics.
Related Axis Intelligence Research analysis: Stablecoin payment statistics · Stablecoin treasury holdings statistics · Ethereum statistics · Cryptocurrency statistics · Blockchain statistics · Stripe statistics