Stablecoin Treasury Holdings Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis | Last updated: August 15, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Tether and Circle together held $201,631,009,197 in US Treasury-linked reserve assets as of June 30, 2026 — but only $123.49 billion of that was direct ownership of Treasury securities. The remaining $78.15 billion, 38.76% of the total, sat in Treasury repurchase agreements. The distinction decides whether stablecoin growth actually buys bills.
Quick Answer
As of June 30, 2026, Axis Intelligence Research calculates that the two largest stablecoin issuers held $201.63 billion in Treasury-linked reserves against $256.89 billion of tokens outstanding — 78.49 cents of Treasury exposure per dollar issued. Direct Treasury securities accounted for $123.49 billion; Treasury repo accounted for $78.15 billion. Axis Intelligence Research’s Direct Bill Transmission Ratio (DBTR™) puts sector-wide direct transmission at 61.24%, splitting 81.78% for Tether against 13.96% for Circle.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that Tether and Circle held a combined $201.63 billion in Treasury-linked reserve assets on June 30, 2026, verified line-by-line against the BDO and Deloitte attestations covering that identical reporting date.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that 38.76% of stablecoin Treasury exposure is repo, not bills — $78.15 billion of the $201.63 billion total is collateralized lending rather than securities ownership.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that Circle’s Direct Bill Transmission Ratio fell from 33.83% to 13.96% in 28 days, as direct Treasury securities dropped $13.11 billion while Treasury repo rose $10.23 billion between June 2 and June 30, 2026.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that Tether’s DBTR of 81.78% exceeds Circle’s by 67.81 percentage points, the widest structural divergence between the two issuers on any reserve dimension.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that the two issuers’ $123.49 billion in direct Treasury securities would rank 19th on the Treasury Department’s Major Foreign Holders table at end-2025 — below South Korea, above Israel.
How Much US Treasury Debt Do Stablecoin Issuers Actually Hold?
The honest answer requires a distinction almost nobody makes: holding a Treasury bill and lending cash against a Treasury bill are not the same transaction.
Both appear in reserve reports under headings that sound interchangeable. Only one of them takes a security out of circulation.
The June 30, 2026 Snapshot
Tether and Circle publish on different cadences — quarterly for Tether, twice-monthly for Circle — but both reported as of June 30, 2026. That coincidence permits a same-date aggregate rather than a stitched estimate.
| Reserve component | Tether (USD₮) | Circle (USDC) | Combined | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct Treasury securities | $114,960,963,604 | $8,524,064,231 | $123,485,027,835 | BDO FFRR; Deloitte examination |
| Overnight reverse repo | $18,625,552,412 | — | — | BDO FFRR |
| Term reverse repo | $6,993,428,950 | — | — | BDO FFRR |
| Treasury repo (total) | $25,618,981,362 | $52,527,000,000 | $78,145,981,362 | BDO FFRR; Deloitte examination |
| Treasury-linked total | $140,579,944,966 | $61,051,064,231 | $201,631,009,197 | Axis Intelligence Research calculation |
| Tokens outstanding | $183,622,105,630 | $73,268,560,097 | $256,890,665,727 | BDO FFRR; Deloitte examination |
All figures as of June 30, 2026. Retrieved August 15, 2026.
Tether’s Financial Figures and Reserves Report, signed off by BDO on July 31, 2026, reports total assets of $187,751,426,411 against liabilities of $183,641,897,215. Circle’s June attestation, examined by Deloitte & Touche and published through Circle’s transparency page, reports reserve assets of $73,344,909,176 against $73,268,560,097 in circulation.
Both totals reconcile exactly from their published line items. That is not a given in this sector, and it is why these two issuers are the only ones in the dataset.
What the Aggregate Covers
At $256.89 billion of tokens outstanding, Tether and Circle represent roughly 83% of a US dollar stablecoin market the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sized at about $308 billion in July 2026. Coverage of the residual 16.6% is not comparable — most smaller issuers publish reserve categories without dollar line items, and an aggregate built on category percentages would be an estimate wearing an attestation’s clothes.
Sarah Davis: The reserve reports are written to be reassuring, and they succeed. What they are not written to do is tell you where the money lands in the Treasury market. A repo line and a bills line sit two rows apart and look like cousins. One of them is a purchase. The other is a 24-hour loan where a bill shows up as collateral and goes home in the morning. If you are forecasting bill demand from stablecoin growth — and Treasury’s own advisory committee is — those two rows need to be counted separately or the forecast is measuring the wrong thing.
The Direct Bill Transmission Ratio (DBTR™)
Definition. The Direct Bill Transmission Ratio measures what share of an issuer’s Treasury-linked reserve exposure reaches the Treasury market as outright ownership of Treasury securities, rather than as cash lent against Treasury collateral.
Formula.
DBTR = Direct Treasury Securities ÷ (Direct Treasury Securities + Treasury Repurchase Agreements) × 100
Worked examples, June 30, 2026.
Tether: $114,960,963,604 ÷ ($114,960,963,604 + $25,618,981,362) = $114,960,963,604 ÷ $140,579,944,966 = 81.78%
Circle: $8,524,064,231 ÷ ($8,524,064,231 + $52,527,000,000) = $8,524,064,231 ÷ $61,051,064,231 = 13.96%
Sector: $123,485,027,835 ÷ $201,631,009,197 = 61.24%
| Issuer | Direct securities | Treasury repo | DBTR™ | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tether (USD₮) | $114.96B | $25.62B | 81.78% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Circle (USDC) | $8.52B | $52.53B | 13.96% | Deloitte examination, Jun 30 2026 |
| Sector | $123.49B | $78.15B | 61.24% | Axis Intelligence Research |
A high DBTR means growth in that issuer’s float converts into balance-sheet demand for bills. A low DBTR means growth converts primarily into demand for overnight secured funding — which supports repo rates and the dealers and clearing entities on the other side, but does not remove bills from the float.
Scope. DBTR measures transmission channel, not credit quality or liquidity. A repo-heavy book is not inferior; it is shorter, more counterparty-dependent, and less interest-rate sensitive. DBTR is computed only from issuers publishing dollar-denominated line items on a common date, and does not capture indirect bill exposure held through third-party money market funds where the fund’s own composition is disclosed separately.
DBTR™ is an original metric of Axis Intelligence Research, first published August 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, “Stablecoin Treasury Holdings Statistics 2026,” axis-intelligence.com.
Why Did Circle’s Treasury Position Change So Fast?
The most striking number in this dataset is not the aggregate. It is the speed.
Circle’s June attestation reports two dates. On June 2, 2026, the Circle Reserve Fund held $21,629,763,499 in Treasury securities across 14 CUSIPs and $42,300,500,000 in Treasury repo. Twenty-eight days later, direct Treasury securities stood at $8,524,064,231 across 9 CUSIPs and repo stood at $52,527,000,000.
| Metric | June 2, 2026 | June 30, 2026 | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct Treasury securities | $21,629,763,499 | $8,524,064,231 | −$13,105,699,268 | Deloitte examination |
| Treasury repo | $42,300,500,000 | $52,527,000,000 | +$10,226,500,000 | Deloitte examination |
| DBTR™ | 33.83% | 13.96% | −19.87 pp | Axis Intelligence Research |
| USDC in circulation | $75,812,529,265 | $73,268,560,097 | −$2,543,969,168 | Deloitte examination |
Circulation fell $2.54 billion over the same window. So the rotation is not simply redemptions draining the bill book — direct securities fell 5.15 times faster than the float, and repo absorbed most of the difference.
This is a continuation of a documented pattern rather than an anomaly. New York Fed researchers tracking the Circle Reserve Fund found that its repo holdings rose from zero to more than 90 percent of net assets after Silicon Valley Bank’s 2023 failure, retreating since to 69 percent — still above the range for Treasury-only money market funds. They also found that Fixed Income Clearing Corporation–sponsored repos, whose ultimate counterparties are typically funding-seeking entities such as hedge funds, reached 77 percent of the fund’s repo book by the fourth quarter of 2025.
The fund is managed by BlackRock and its holdings are published daily on the Circle Reserve Fund page, which is what makes this level of scrutiny possible at all.
Sarah Davis: Post-SVB, Circle traded interest-rate risk for counterparty risk, and said so. What the June file shows is that the trade is still running and still moving. A 19.87-point DBTR swing inside one month is not portfolio drift — that is a deliberate reallocation across a $61 billion book. It also means any bill-demand model calibrated on Circle’s reserve size rather than its reserve composition was wrong by $13.11 billion in four weeks. Composition is the variable. Size is the headline.
How Does Stablecoin Treasury Ownership Compare to Sovereign Holders?
The popular comparison — “Tether is a top-20 holder of US debt” — is directionally real and methodologically loose. It usually adds repo to bills, then benchmarks the sum against a Treasury dataset that counts securities held.
Axis Intelligence Research applies the compatible comparison instead: direct Treasury securities only, against the Treasury Department’s Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities series.
| Rank | Holder | Holdings | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | Brazil | $168.7B | Treasury/Federal Reserve Board, TIC |
| 17 | Saudi Arabia | $149.5B | Treasury/Federal Reserve Board, TIC |
| 18 | Korea, South | $140.6B | Treasury/Federal Reserve Board, TIC |
| 19 | Tether + Circle, direct securities only | $123.49B | Axis Intelligence Research |
| 20 | Israel | $105.7B | Treasury/Federal Reserve Board, TIC |
| 21 | Germany | $103.1B | Treasury/Federal Reserve Board, TIC |
Country figures are holdings at end-December 2025, revised July 14, 2026. Issuer figure is as of June 30, 2026. Placement is illustrative of scale across non-identical dates, not a same-date ranking.
Include repo and the combined $201.63 billion would slot near Norway’s $208.1 billion instead. Axis Intelligence Research publishes the direct-only placement because the TIC series measures securities held, and merging a repo exposure into it produces a number that means nothing in either dataset. The wider figure is disclosed above; it is simply not the one that belongs in this table.
What Does the GENIUS Act Require Reserves to Hold?
The GENIUS Act, enacted July 18, 2025 as Public Law 119-27, is the first federal framework for payment stablecoins. Its reserve schedule is what makes DBTR a policy question rather than an accounting curiosity.
Permitted reserve assets include US currency and demand deposits; Treasury securities with 93 days or less remaining maturity; repurchase agreements of 7 days or less backed by short-dated Treasury bills; reverse repos of 7 days or less collateralized by Treasury securities; money market funds investing in those instruments; and central bank reserve deposits.
Repo and bills sit inside the same permitted set. Nothing in the statute pushes an issuer toward one or the other. The statute also bars yield-bearing payment stablecoins and mandates monthly disclosure.
What Treasury’s Own Advisory Committee Projected
The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee’s April 2025 Digital Money presentation estimated that stablecoin issuers then held more than $120 billion in T-bills, and modeled roughly $1.0 trillion of implied holdings by 2028 against a market growing to about $2 trillion — an implied incremental demand of approximately $900 billion. TBAC noted explicitly that the reserve compositions it tabulated were self-reported and not independently verified.
Fifteen months later, the two largest issuers hold $123.49 billion in direct securities — broadly consistent with TBAC’s starting point. The forecast’s weak joint is the assumption that the direct-holding share stays put. Sector DBTR is 61.24% today and the larger of the two issuers by float is running at 13.96%. If Circle’s composition rather than Tether’s becomes the sector norm as regulated issuance grows, the same $2 trillion market cap produces materially less outright bill demand than the projection implies — and considerably more overnight repo volume.
Standard Chartered analysts have separately projected $0.8–1.0 trillion of incremental T-bill demand by 2028 on a similar market-cap path. That research is not linked here because Axis Intelligence Research links only to primary sources; the figure is named as published.
Do Stablecoin Reserves Actually Move Treasury Yields?
Two 2026 papers put numbers on it.
Bank for International Settlements researchers, in Working Paper 1270, find that stablecoin inflows reduce three-month Treasury bill yields by 2.5–3.5 basis points, with the effect rising to 5–8 basis points during periods of bill scarcity and concentrating in short maturities with limited spillover further out. The International Monetary Fund’s Working Paper 2026/044, published March 6, 2026, examines stablecoin demand shocks across Treasury bills, equities and exchange rates.
Both are estimated on flows into stablecoins rather than on the reserve composition those flows fund. DBTR is the missing coefficient. A dollar entering a book with an 81.78% DBTR and a dollar entering a book with a 13.96% DBTR reach the bill market with very different force, and neither paper’s identification separates them — which is a research opportunity, not a criticism.
What Else Sits Behind the Two Largest Stablecoins?
Treasury exposure is not the whole reserve. Tether’s is the more diversified book by a wide margin.
| Asset category | Value | Share of assets | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Treasury bills | $114,960,963,604 | 61.23% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Overnight reverse repo | $18,625,552,412 | 9.92% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Precious metals | $18,838,357,171 | 10.03% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Secured loans | $13,453,749,726 | 7.17% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Term reverse repo | $6,993,428,950 | 3.72% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Bitcoin | $5,801,630,681 | 3.09% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Other investments | $5,244,911,675 | 2.79% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Public equities | $3,761,438,892 | 2.00% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Non-US Treasury bills | $22,374,689 | 0.01% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Cash and bank deposits | $40,307,440 | 0.02% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Corporate bonds | $8,711,171 | 0.005% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
| Total assets | $187,751,426,411 | 100% | BDO FFRR, Jun 30 2026 |
Treasury-linked assets are 74.88% of Tether’s balance sheet. The other 25.12% — gold, bitcoin, equities, secured loans, other investments — is what makes Tether’s reserve a portfolio rather than a cash sweep. Gold alone was valued at $4,008.02 per ounce and bitcoin at $58,642.15 as of the reporting date.
Circle’s book has no equivalent tail: 83.24% Treasury-linked, 16.89% cash, and nothing else.
The Buffer Question
Tether’s equity — assets over liabilities — fell from $6,338 million at December 31, 2025 to $4,110 million at June 30, 2026, a $2,228 million decline across the half. The BDO report walks it: a negative financial result of $3,171 million offset by $943 million of net capital movements. Against $183.62 billion of tokens outstanding, the June buffer is 2.238%.
Circle’s overcollateralization on the same date was $76,349,079 against $73.27 billion in circulation — a fundamentally different model, where the buffer is thin by design because the reserve holds no volatile assets to absorb.
Tether announced on August 13, 2026 that KPMG had issued an unqualified opinion on its 2025 financial statements, its first completed full audit. That closes the longest-running credibility gap in the sector, and it post-dates every figure in this dataset.
Sarah Davis: The buffer halved while the Treasury book stayed put. That tells you exactly which assets moved: gold and bitcoin fell during the quarter, and the equity line absorbed it. The bills did their job — that is what bills are for. The interesting question for anyone modeling redemption stress is not whether the Treasury leg holds. It is whether a 2.24% cushion is sized for a portfolio where a quarter of assets mark to market daily.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure originates from a document fetched and read during production on August 15, 2026. Two documents anchor the dataset: Tether International S.A. de C.V.’s Financial Figures and Reserves Report as of June 30, 2026, with the BDO Advisory Services ISAE 3000R assurance report dated July 31, 2026; and Circle Internet Group’s USDC Reserve Report as of June 2 and June 30, 2026, with the Deloitte & Touche examination report dated July 29, 2026. Supporting documents comprise the TBAC Digital Money presentation of April 30, 2025, Treasury/Federal Reserve Board TIC Major Foreign Holders data revised July 14, 2026, Public Law 119-27, BIS Working Paper 1270, IMF Working Paper 2026/044, and Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics of July 31, 2026.
Verification. Both issuer reports were reconciled from line items to published totals. Tether’s eleven asset categories sum to $187,751,426,411, matching the stated total exactly; assets less liabilities equals the stated $4,109,529,196 exactly. Circle’s fund and non-fund components sum to $73,344,909,176, matching exactly. Every derived figure was computed twice in independent passes with assertion checks; both passes agreed.
Formulas. DBTR™ = Direct Treasury Securities ÷ (Direct Treasury Securities + Treasury Repurchase Agreements) × 100. Treasury-linked total = direct Treasury securities + overnight reverse repo + term reverse repo. Coverage per token = Treasury-linked total ÷ tokens outstanding.
Definitions. “Direct Treasury securities” means Treasury bills owned outright, including securities held within the Circle Reserve Fund, which Circle wholly owns. “Treasury repo” means reverse repurchase agreements collateralized by Treasury securities. Tether’s tokens outstanding uses the liability figure of $183,622,105,630; gross contractual redemption value across all tokens issued is $184,588,527,295, the difference being tokens held by the company outside its treasury wallet.
Scope. The dataset covers two issuers, which together represent roughly 83% of US dollar stablecoin market capitalization. Smaller issuers are excluded because they disclose composition as percentages rather than dollar line items, and an aggregate mixing the two disclosure standards would not be reproducible. Attestations are point-in-time engagements, not continuous assurance; the BDO report states its conclusion is limited to June 30, 2026. Country comparisons draw on end-December 2025 TIC data against a June 2026 issuer snapshot and are presented as scale illustration rather than same-date ranking.
About This Dataset
stablecoin-treasury-holdings-statistics-2026.csv contains every figure appearing in this article, one observation per row, with full provenance: value, unit, as-of date, source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, Axis-calculated flag, and method notes carrying the formula for every derived row.
License: CC BY 4.0. Free to use, redistribute and build upon with attribution.
Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, “Stablecoin Treasury Holdings Statistics 2026,” axis-intelligence.com, 2026.
The June 30, 2026 DBTR readings are baseline readings for this metric.
Citation Formats
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Stablecoin treasury holdings statistics 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/stablecoin-treasury-holdings-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “Stablecoin Treasury Holdings Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence, 2026, axis-intelligence.com/stablecoin-treasury-holdings-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “Stablecoin Treasury Holdings Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/stablecoin-treasury-holdings-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a stablecoin issuer’s reverse repo position create demand for Treasury bills?
Not in the same way an outright purchase does. In a reverse repo the issuer lends cash and receives Treasury collateral for the term — one day for Tether’s overnight book, seven days or less under GENIUS Act limits. The security stays on the borrower’s books economically and returns at maturity. The transaction supports secured funding markets and the collateral’s financing value, but it does not reduce the float of bills available to other buyers the way a purchase-to-hold does. This is why Axis Intelligence Research separates the two in DBTR rather than reporting a single Treasury exposure figure.
Why is Circle’s direct Treasury bill holding so much smaller than Tether’s despite both holding short-dated reserves?
Circle holds the majority of USDC reserves inside the Circle Reserve Fund, a Rule 2a-7 government money market fund managed by BlackRock, and that fund has run a repo-dominant portfolio since the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank episode. New York Fed researchers document the fund’s repo share spiking above 90% of net assets after SVB and settling around 69%. Tether holds bills directly on its own balance sheet with a weighted average maturity under 90 days. Same asset class, opposite structural choice — and a 67.81 percentage point DBTR gap as the result.
What is the difference between an attestation and an audit for stablecoin reserves?
An attestation confirms a specific management assertion at a specific instant. BDO’s ISAE 3000R engagement for Tether and Deloitte’s AICPA examination for Circle both do this — they test whether reserves equalled or exceeded liabilities on the stated date, and both explicitly disclaim any assurance on other dates. An audit examines systems, controls and transactions across a full fiscal year and issues an opinion on financial statements. Tether announced completion of its first full audit, with an unqualified KPMG opinion on 2025 financials, on August 13, 2026 — after every figure in this dataset.
Can stablecoin issuers hold Treasury notes and bonds, or only bills?
The GENIUS Act permits Treasury securities with 93 days or less of remaining maturity, which in practice means bills and the short tail of previously issued notes. It also permits repos of 7 days or less backed by bills maturing within 90 days, and reverse repos of 7 days or less collateralized by Treasury bills, notes or bonds. The effect is to concentrate compliant reserves at the very front of the curve — which is why BIS finds the yield impact concentrated in three-month bills with limited spillover to longer maturities.
How much of a stablecoin’s reserve is required to be in Treasuries?
None specifically. The statute requires one-to-one backing by permitted reserve assets, and cash at banks, central bank deposits and qualifying money market fund shares all qualify alongside Treasury instruments. That is why Circle can run 16.89% cash and Tether can run 25.12% of assets in gold, bitcoin, equities and secured loans while both remain fully reserved. Composition inside the permitted set is a business decision, and DBTR exists to measure it.
Why do Tether’s tokens issued and tokens outstanding differ?
Tether’s June 30, 2026 report gives $184,588,527,295 as the gross contractual redemption value of all digital tokens issued, and $183,622,105,630 as the liability related to tokens issued. The $808,077,231 difference is tokens held by the company but outside its treasury wallet, which do not form part of assets or liabilities. Tokens sitting in the treasury wallet are authorized but not yet issued and are not liabilities at all. Aggregating token supply across issuers without applying this adjustment overstates the sector float.
Does the reserve buffer protect against a redemption run?
It absorbs valuation losses before the peg is tested, which is a narrower job than run protection. Tether’s buffer fell from $6.338 billion to $4.110 billion across the first half of 2026, leaving 2.238% of tokens outstanding — a cushion sized against a portfolio where gold, bitcoin and equities mark to market daily. Circle’s $76,349,079 overcollateralization looks negligible by comparison but sits on a reserve with essentially no mark-to-market risk. Run resilience depends on redemption mechanics and asset liquidity, not buffer size alone.
Are stablecoin issuers really among the largest holders of US Treasury debt?
At the scale of mid-sized sovereigns, yes. Tether and Circle’s $123.49 billion in direct Treasury securities would place 19th on Treasury’s Major Foreign Holders table at end-2025, between South Korea and Israel. The widely repeated “top 20 holder” framing generally reaches that rank by adding repo to bills, which inflates the comparison against a dataset that counts securities held. Both figures appear in this dataset; only the direct-securities figure belongs in a ranking against TIC.
What would change the DBTR readings materially?
Three things. A shift in Circle Reserve Fund allocation back toward direct bills, which the fund has done before and reversed. Growth in bank-affiliated issuers whose reserves sit in central bank deposits rather than either bills or repo — a channel that would lower system-wide Treasury transmission without appearing in DBTR at all. And any implementing rule under the GENIUS Act that differentiates capital or liquidity treatment between direct holdings and repo, which currently it does not.
Related Axis Intelligence Research analysis: our Neobank statistics dataset covers the deposit base stablecoins are increasingly competing with; Stripe statistics examines stablecoin infrastructure optionality in payments valuations; Bitcoin mining statistics covers the asset that drove Tether’s half-year buffer decline; our crypto exchanges list maps where stablecoin float circulates; and the full Axis statistics library indexes every dataset we publish.